Why is it so hard to find a dentist in the bush?

In 2023, 74.3% of the population lived in major cities across Australia, and dentists disproportionately work in these areas. That means for one quarter of the population, access to dental care - both treatment and importantly prevention - is compromised.

There were 566 Local Government Areas (LGAs) spanning a geographic area of 7.69 million km² with a population of 25,369,908 in 2023. Of those, there were 216 (39.6%) with no dentists, covering 5.64 million km² (73.4%) and with 717,106 people (2.8%) living there. 54 of them had a population >5,000 including 6 with populations ranging from 15,000 to 19,000 and a geographic area spanning 558-5507 km².

Going beyond that, there is a vast disparity in the density of dentists in major cities compared with regional and rural areas that do have dentists. In major cities there are around 70 full-time equivalent (FTE) dentists per 100,000. That’s one dentist for every 1400 people. But in inner regional areas - places like Coffs Harbour, Ballarat, Albury, Rockhamptom, Toowoomba, Barossa, Victor Harbour, Bunbury and Launceston - it drops to around 46 per 100,000. The are large population centres where around 18% of Australians live.

When we move a little further away to outer regional areas where around 8% of the population lives – places like Parkes, Forbes, Mildura, Townsville, Cairns, Mt Gambier, Albany or Devonport – the ratio drops to 40 dentists per 100,000. And then in those remote and very remote areas, it drops again to 20 dentists per 100,000. That’s 1 dentist for every 5000 people.

In this episode of the Dental As Anything podcast we explore some of the factors that contribute to this maldistribution and look at some of the solutions that have been tried to address this.

References:

Tadakamadla, S.K., Balla, S.B., Tadakamadla, J. et al. Determinants of rural practice among a cohort of dental professionals in Australia. BMC Med Educ 25, 142 (2025). https://bmcmededuc.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12909-025-06681-2

In case you missed it, you can catch up with the previous episodes of the Dental As Anything podcast here and read news articles here.