Italia

Data on dentists should refer to those “immediately serving patients”, i.e. dentists who have direct contact with patients as consumers of health care services. In the context of comparing health care services across Member States, Eurostat considers that this is the concept which best describes the availability of health care resources. However, Member States use different concepts when they report the number of health care professionals. Therefore for some countries the data might refer to dentists ‘licensed to practice’ (i.e. successfully graduated dentists irrespective whether they see patients or not) or they might include dentists who work in their profession but do not see patients (i.e. they work in research, administration etc.). Please have a look in the annexes of the metadata to see for which concept these data refer to for each country.