Christie & Co publishes first annual report highlighting emerging workforce trends and challenges

The report provides an overview of the dental market structure and presents leading market research on the sector’s dentist shortage and key staffing challenges, emerging workforce trends, and regional differences in relation to supply and NHS dentists' pay rates.

The report highlights how the landscape of the UK dental market has significantly changed over recent years, as merger and acquisition activity across the sector has shown significant growth. The UK dental market comprises 12,500 dental practices, of which only a relatively small percentage are owned by corporate or multiple operators. This presents an opportunity for further consolidation in the market for the larger corporates, but also smaller groups.

The dental workforce is composed of 116.2k registered dental professionals, including dentists, dental nurses, therapists, technicians and hygienists. Although the number of UK qualified dentists has grown year on year since 2014, greater domestic growth in new registrations will be essential to improve staffing, given the overall number of registered dentists who qualified in the EEA or overseas has decreased over the same period. Additionally, in 2017 the number of new registrations by dentists who qualified in the EEA dropped by 19 per cent compared to 2016 and 39 per cent over two years, and with Brexit looming, the supply of EEA qualified dentists could increasingly become an issue should negative growth trends continue.