The trend towards lower cost and maitanence dentistry continues as the economy continues to contract, with dentures, teeth cleaning and fillings enquiries all seeing substantial increases against the last year’s averages. Bucking that trend though are dental implants, one of the most costly treatments around, which saw a 20.7% increase in market share, up to 17% compared to the yearly average of 14.1%.

Irish patients continue to enquire about treatment in Northern Ireland in large numbers, with root canals and dental implants seeing the biggest shifts from the norms, but it’s bad news for denture clinics for this month at least as patients in the Republic seek more intent on staying put than making the journey across the border.

Figures for Irish enquiries about dental tourism treatments reveal a shift away from the slightly cheaper treatments of teeth whitening and veneers back towards implants, crowns and bridges. There were also more surprising increases for root canals, dentures and even fillings. This might be because of the run up to people’s summer holidays, so people are already travelling to foreign destinations.

The trend more for breast reduction operations for women continues, as does the increased interest in liposuction. Male breast reduction, also known as treatment for gynecomastia, mirrors the increase in popularity noted in the UK by growing its market share from an average of 1.5% of enquiries to 3% of enquiries in May.

Botox is the undisputed king of the hill in the cosmetic beauty treatment world, accounting for 27.9% of Irish enquiries in May. Laser hair removal is a distant but growing second at 14% of the market.

Finally the overview of medical tourism from Ireland shows very small falls in market share for dental and cosmetic surgery enquiries, with fertility clinics being the biggest winners. In an average month fertility clinics abroad account for 1.5% of Irish medical tourism enquiries, whereas last month they managed to take 3.6% of the market.

More data about the UK market will follow on Monday. If you’d like to see some other statistics about Irish private health patients or have any questions about the above please leave a comment in the box below.

RevaHealth.com Monthly Growth - May 2009

Average monthly growth rates have been around the 20% mark since the start of the year, and we’re hoping to push these up to 30% per month as the year goes on. Obviously this gets hard the more traffic we generate, but we have our ideas and we’re making our plans so we’ll keep you posted!

As usual, the majority of our traffic came from the UK (37.21%), Ireland (26.10%) and the US (10.60%). According to our Google analytics, the remaining 26.09% came from 182 different countries or territories! This got us interested, and since the start of the year, we count only 13 countries on the map that haven’t visited our site since the start of the year. I wonder if we can get this number down by year’s end?

The split between people using our site to contact clinics at home or clinics abroad remained roughly the same this month for both the UK and Ireland. As our SEO efforts for our local listings take hold we should see the proportion of enquiries for clinics at home increase, but only time will tell.

Home vs Abroad (UK) - May 2009

Home vs Abroad (IRL) - May 2009

Of interest here, we know that the number of people looking at clinics (as opposed to contacting them) is far higher than the contact figures above reflect, so from next month we’re going to look at providing figures for visitors and figures for users i.e. people who just come to the site versus people who use the site to contact clinics. The differences in their behaviours should be interesting.

Interest in travelling to Northern Ireland from the Republic is strong as ever, with the raw number of enquiries up another 12% month on month, and the percentage of enquiries slipping just slightly from 19.73% to 19.11%.

Poland leapfrogs Hungary and Turkey this month to claim the most popular foreign destination title, with Bulgaria taking Spain’s place at the end of the top 5.

Top 5 destinations (IRL) - May 2009

Our methods of calculating which treatments people are interested in have changed slightly this month, so we can’t compare them directly to previous months, but there are no real surprises in the top 5 treatments in dentistry for Irish patients. Cosmetic surgery though has seen a slight shift towards weight related treatments, as expected as the summer approaches.

Top 5 dental treatments (IRL) - May 2009

Top 5 cosmetic treatments (IRL) - May 2009

One of the fastest rising treatments we found in our incoming keywords was “Endermologie”, which was a new one on me. This was closely followed by “Mesotherapy”. It turns out these are both treatments aimed at reducing cellulite, so I guess bikiniphobia was particularly strong in May!

The countries outside of the UK that British people were interested in visiting stayed much the same, with only Spain replacing Bulgaria in the top 5. Poland remained the most popular destination for people from the UK.

Top 5 Destinations (UK) - May 2009

While the UK interest in dental treatments pretty much mirrored that in Ireland, the cosmetic surgery treatments being requested differed in that acne / scar removal and tattoo removal weere 2nd and 3rd after Botox in the UK.

Top 5 dental treatments (UK) - May 2009

Top 5 cosmetic treatments (UK) - May 2009