Setting up and running a dental clinic in India is no child’s play. We aim to make it simpler for you with this guide to estimating dental clinic costs. In this article1 Education: A big cost incurred even before starting practice2 1. Dental treatment costs: Those incurred for actual dental treatment A. Costs incurred for dental fillings B. Costs incurred for tooth extraction C. Costs incurred for root canal treatment (RCT) D. Costs incurred for dental crowns E. Costs incurred for dental implants3 2. Running costs of a dental clinic: Those incurred independent of actual dental treatment Property costs for dental clinics in India4 The last word Share this: BDS (Bachelor of Dental Surgery) is a reputed degree and dentistry, a respectable, prestigious profession in our country. In India, there are a total of 295 dental colleges, which produce around 30,000 dentists per year. Till date 1.3 lakh dental students have registered with the Dental Council of India and the dentist-patient ratio is 1:5000 as against the desired ratio of 1:7500.
This means there are more dentists available than necessary, and as a result, many dentists are now looking to quickly set up clinics in different parts of the country and start their dental practice as soon as possible. Here is an overview of all common costs involved in setting up and running a dental practice: It would be incomplete to not include educational costs in this articles since they weigh heavily in the first few years of practice. For first year BDS alone, the fee in a government college is around Rs. 47,400 for open category students, as against Rs. 9,600 for reserved category students. In private colleges, the fee structure varies between 2.5 lakhs to 3.25 lakhs per year, for a period of four years. That’s a total of anywhere between 10 lakhs to 13 lakhs, most of which could be student loan debt that students would end up repaying once they start their practice. The costs of running a dental clinic in India can be broadly summarised into 2 groups:
Dentists require various machines, instruments and implements to perform dental procedures. Here are some basic minimum requirements to be planned for: All such equipment undergoes daily wear and tear and over a period of time requires replacement. Apart from these, there are various costs incurred at a unit level, while performing procedures. Here is an indicative list: This is one of the most common procedures that requires dental drills, dental burs (‘drill bits’, i.e. small, sharp metallic objects used for cutting teeth) and filling material. Routine fillings (also called ‘restorations’) cost between Rs. 500-2000 to the patient. For this simple procedure, the dentist uses local anaesthesia, syringe & needle, dental forceps, cotton and sometimes dental drills. This common procedure costs the patient Rs. 100 to 5000, depending on complexity. Another routine procedure, RCT requires several implements: dental drills & burs, several X-rays, dental files, measuring gauges, antiseptic solution, filling material (gutta purcha), cements, and more.
The cost for each one varies widely, but the total cost ranges around Rs. 300 to 1500 per patient. RCT costs around Rs. 1000 to 5000 for the patient. This procedure has three stages: Patients generally pay Rs. 1000 to 10,000 for a single crown. These are metallic screws used to fix artificial teeth into jawbones. Since this is a surgical procedure, the costs related to surgery range from Rs. 500 to 3000. Placing dental implants also requires equipment such as physiodispensers (machines that help drill the implant into the bone) and special dental burs, which together cost Rs. 25,000 to 2,00,000. Apart from these, the dental implants themselves cost Rs. 1000 to 10,000. The cost to the patient is around Rs. 20,000 to 50,000. To sum it up, the total costs of all the above ends up crossing 6 figures. Its obvious that even basic costs incurred for simple procedures are fairly sizeable! A dental clinic is a small business, and incurs similar costs to any commercial establishment.
Here are some common costs: Any good set-up in a busy area of a city costs a fortune to make and maintain, and running costs vary widely. However, do expect these costs to be no less than Rs. 20,000 and to easily reach Rs. 1,00,000. Since rental costs keep changing from time to time, it is important to know general trends & rate brackets, for efficient planning. You can check out the commercial property rates at Magicbricks and Housing, among other websites. It is clear that setting up and running a clinic is not easy, and with each passing day, costs are only going up. Prospective dentists must thus budget for costs correctly and rely on thorough market research to plan for their practice. – Contributed by Dr. Rachita Narsaria Are you a doctor? Keep yourself updated with our practice improvement tips. We respect & value your privacy. There is great pressure for the doctor to recover education expenses, pay off loans, generate enough revenue to cover all fixed & running costs, and still take something home.
We at Practo strive to empower doctors with knowledge and information to help manage their medical practice effectively (thus lowering costs), to market their practice (thus bringing in more revenue) and at the end of it all, to help make their lives more peaceful & stress-free.News Home » City » KanpurIIT-K students develop low cost dental chairAbhinav MalhotraKanpur: Three students of design program (name of a department) of IIT-Kanpur along with a team of students from PUJ (Pontificia Universidad Javeriana) university based in Colombia in the US, under the guidance of IIT-K faculty members have remained successful in developing a low cost dental chair worth Rs 20,000 only (this does not include the price of the dental tools used by the dentists). This is the cheapest dental chair in the Indian market as the traditional chairs range anywhere between Rs one lakh to five lakhs. The affordable dental chair developed under the ME310 (name of a course) program run at Stanford University has been named as 'FLux".
The prototype of the chair has been installed at Sardar Patel postgraduate institute of medical and dental sciences in Lucknow where it is being used successfully since September 2015. This has raised hope that the mass production of this dental chair could be done in near future which would further bring down the cost. The development of this dental chair has received applause from project director, Standford university, Larry Lifer. The most unique feature of this dental chair being that it is very patient friendly. Talking to TOI, Amit Kundal, PHd scholar at IIT-Kanpur who has worked on developing the chair said, "It was after carrying out thorough study of the present day dental chairs and the needs of the patients that we started working on the design of our chair. While we omitted out those features which were not required, we added a few features which could have made our designed chair a comfortable experience for the patients. The dental tools which otherwise a patient is able to see on a traditional dental chair is not visible in our model.
The tools visible to the patients unnecessarily create panic in his mind knowing the fact that he has to undergo a dental surgery." He while talking about a new feature of this chair said that spittoon has been made modular in low cost chair instead of it being manual. Kundal said that in this mega project two universities including IIT-Kanpur and PUJ Colombia were the academic partners, Sardar Patel PG institute of Medical and Dental Sciences in Lucknow was the industry partner. The project was supported by Stanford university. Prof Shantanu Bhattacharya under whose guidance the dental chair was developed said a patent for the low cost dental chair has been filed by us. He said that the students took guidance and consultation for their project from other faculty members on the institute campus. This included valuable comments from Prof Satyki Ray of Design program department. Mohit Tewari, another student involved in the project informed that the low cost dental chair will come in the budget of the dentists who otherwise find it difficult to set up a dental clinic as the tools specially the chair comes very costly.