Belgian dentists and new patients: what 230 practice websites say

How many practices have stopped taking new patients?

In Flanders, one practice website in four announces a patient stop (“patiëntenstop”): 34 of 141. Add the partial stops and waiting lists, and one Flemish practice in three tells a new patient they cannot be seen soon. A partial stop applies only to orthodontics, for example, or only admits patients from the practice’s own town.

In Wallonia we found no stop on 51 websites, and in Brussels, on 38 websites, one practice that takes no new patients in busy periods. On several French-language websites we found the opposite: a form or a button for a new patient to ask for a first appointment.

Why mostly in Flanders?

These figures cannot tell, and we will not pretend they do. What is established: the Flemish government speaks of a historic shortage of dentists, and the number of dentists per inhabitant is falling. But the Walloon government also counts dentists among the professions in persistent shortage, and the federal Planning Commission calls the uneven spread most acute precisely in Wallonia.

One possible explanation is that announcing a patient stop online has become a habit in Flanders, while a practice in Wallonia or Brussels gives a long wait without saying so on its website. That is a hypothesis, not a finding. The official figures are on the page about the dentist and dental assistant shortage in Belgium.

How do patients book an appointment?

Mostly still by phone. One practice in four lets patients book online: 55 of 230, about the same in all three regions. Sometimes only for a check-up, or only for existing patients. Two thirds of websites show an e-mail address.

WhatsApp as a contact channel barely exists: 2 websites out of 230 have a WhatsApp button, both in Brussels. We found a chat window on 10 websites.

What does it mean for a practice’s front desk?

That the phone stays the front door, even in a practice with a patient stop. A new patient who does not read the website calls anyway, and someone has to explain kindly that it is not possible, where they can go instead and whether there is a waiting list. In a practice that has to turn away one new caller in three, that is a large part of the day.

That conversation does not have to be held by the assistant at the chair. An AI dental receptionist can hold it the same way every time, offer the waiting list if you keep one, and keep booking existing patients.

How we measured it

We started from OpenStreetMap, the open map anyone may use. It lists 951 Belgian dental practices, 321 of them with a website. After removing duplicate websites and profiles on Facebook or a booking platform, 291 practice websites remained. We could read 230 of them: 44 were unreachable, 16 showed no text without JavaScript, and one asked not to be read.

For each website we read the home page and up to four pages such as contact, appointments and practical information, on 28 September 2026, slowly and respecting robots.txt. The text was kept only while we classified it. Only yes or no signals per region were kept, and we name no practice.

• The sample is not random: OpenStreetMap does not know every practice, and a practice without a website is left out. Flanders is slightly over-represented (61% of the websites read, against 58% of dentists), Wallonia slightly under-represented.
• A website can be out of date: a lifted stop may still be shown, and the reverse.
• What sits in an image or appears only with JavaScript was not seen.
• Two signals we also measured, phone hours and on-call information, are not published: our word lists found them better in Dutch than in French, which would have skewed the comparison between regions.

OpenStreetMap, dental practices in Belgium (amenity=dentist and healthcare=dentist), retrieved 28 September 2026, © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL