[Shortage of dentists as a regional problem]

This article is about the dental human resource situation at a regional level in the Netherlands. Based on data made available by the Dutch Dental Association (NMT) and the Central Bureau for Statistics (CBS), the supply of dentists and the potential demand for dental health care within 34 NMT-regions is described. Supply and demand are related to each other. In order to gain more insight into the relationship between the supply of and the demand for dental care some dentist/population ratios have been calculated for each region and for various segments of the population separately. It appears that these ratios per region vary considerably, which makes the dental human resource issue in the Netherlands, from a regional point of view, rather diverse.