Greece has more dentists relative to its population than almost any other European Union country. Yet Greeks are also the Europeans most likely to report being unable to obtain dental treatment when they need it.
That contradiction is at the heart of a peer-reviewed study published September 1 in the journal Oral.
Authors Maria Gamvrouli, Christos Triantafyllou, Vasileios Psiakis and João Breda conducted a structured synthesis of publicly available evidence and mapped the Greek oral-health system across access, financing, workforce, prevention and quality measurement.
Their findings describe a system with a large supply of dentists but limited public coverage. Dental care remains highly dependent on private providers and payments made directly by patients.
Greece is a European Outlier
Eurostat workforce data show that Greece reported 133 dentists licensed to practise per 100,000 residents in 2023, one of the EU’s highest ratios.
As the researchers put it, “Greece combines a high dentist-to-population ratio with limited public dental coverage.”
The figure requires some qualification. Eurostat’s Greek data count dentists who are licensed to practise, rather than only those actively providing care. The category can include dentists who are unemployed, retired, working abroad or employed outside clinical practice.
Access figures tell a very different story. According to Eurostat data for 2024, 27.1% of people in Greece who said they needed dental care reported that they could not obtain it because of cost, long waiting lists or distance from a provider.
That was the highest rate in the EU, ahead of Latvia at 16.5% and Romania at 16.2%.
The disparity was particularly severe among poorer households. Some 52.8% of people at risk of poverty who needed dental care reported unmet needs, compared with 22.7% among those not considered at risk. The resulting gap of 30.1 percentage points was the second widest recorded in the EU.
A separate Eurostat measure, calculated across the entire population aged 16 and over, placed Greece’s unmet dental-care rate at 15.3% in 2024, compared with an EU average of 4.6%.
Dental Care Access Depends on Ability to Pay
The study identifies heavy reliance on direct household payments as a central feature of Greek dental care. The availability of licensed dentists therefore does not necessarily produce effective access, particularly for people unable to afford private treatment.
The researchers also describe a fragmented system oriented more toward treating existing problems than preventing them. They identify weaknesses in public coverage, coordination and the consistent measurement of treatment quality and patient outcomes.
This matters because many oral diseases are preventable or easier to treat when detected early. When access depends largely on whether patients can finance private treatment, lower-income households may postpone care until their conditions become more serious.
The authors argue that improving Greek oral healthcare would require “a shift from fragmented, curative and privately financed care.” They also call for a stronger emphasis on prevention, better integration with primary healthcare and clearer national indicators for measuring access, quality and outcomes.
