A warm welcome to DS World in the Middle East!  Can you share your satisfaction of what Dentsply Sirona achieved in these days?

It’s fantastic! We kicked off the event yesterday morning and Simon Campion, our CEO, stood up and gave his introductory speech to a packed room of more than 800 participants. We couldn’t be more pleased with the turnout and enthusiasm of those who have come to the event. The breakout rooms were amazing—they were all full last night! One of the presenters told me that, although he had a presentation ready, the audience was so thirsty for knowledge that he stopped and instead encouraged the audience to ask him questions and explored the answers to these with them.

Why Middle East?

The Middle Eastern market is a rapidly growing market with lots of opportunity and a great community of dentists. I’ve not been here since 2016 but coming back and seeing a lot of the people I knew from before is wonderful. People are so friendly, open, and entrepreneurial. People are looking to build their businesses and build opportunity and, above all else, offer better dental care to patients in the region. That’s why we’re here, because we recognise that this is a strong growth area for our business.

Dentsply Sirona World in Las Vegas was presented as the Ultimate dental meeting. What makes this event the “ultimate”?

For us, the opportunity to have close conversations with our customers is invaluable, so when we get people in an environment like we have here at Dentsply Sirona World Dubai, it’s a great opportunity for them to be immersed in Dentsply Sirona. It’s more time for them to spend talking to us, looking at our workflows, looking at our products, talking to our specialists. It’s a great opportunity to have longer, more in-depth conversations in a more relaxed atmosphere. That’s why we think it’s the ultimate event. Compared with traditional trade shows, the depth of conversations you’ll have at an event like this are much more meaningful, and this builds stronger relationships as well.

The event features the company’s entire portfolio of products and solutions together with strong educational program. Which product line do you feel is best represented in the Middle East region and which line still require more awareness?

Our portfolio and market share are different in different regions of the world. In the Middle East, we’ve traditionally had very strong market share in endodontics, restorative dentistry and in treatment centres. The focus of our business now is digital workflows. The complete digital workflow in implantology, involving the intraoral scan, hard-tissue imaging, planning of treatment and placement of the implant, is something we want to expand in the region. We are also very keen to start offering our products in the Middle East for our SureSmile clear aligner business, again involving a digital workflow, from the scan through to the Clear Aligner.

We have all the solutions for a digital workflow, and we have the opportunity to make sure that these components work better together. DS Core is available from anywhere. You can access DS Core from your tablet. I’m based in the UK near London, and if I was a clinician and my dental practice was there, I could access case files and do some planning this evening from here in Dubai. That’s the beauty of having DS Core in the cloud, being able to store, access and share data securely in one place. I think that’s the way forward.

Digital dentistry is a significant focus of the event. How does digital technology improve patient care, and does Dentsply Sirona monitor patient satisfaction? And what is the future of oral healthcare in your opinion?

Yesterday, I was talking to a dentist who was a little bit sceptical about a digital workflow, but since getting Primescan has never looked back. He went from being unsure about acquiring an intraoral scanner to not being able to do without it. This is because of the access it gives. I asked him why this was so important to him, and he said that one thing was that it is easy to use for him personally. He said that the second thing—which is really important—is that he can share images with the patient that he was never able to share before. When he does a scan of the mouth and starts rotating the 3D image on the screen, the patient sees his or her dentition for the first time in that way and starts asking questions, and that in itself begins a conversation about oral health.

That’s a really important part of digital dentistry: It brings a patient into the discussion much more. Previously, the dentist would tell the patient what needed to be done, and the patient would not really be involved much in that discussion, but now the patient can see his or her dentition on the screen and talk about what can be seen. Is it bruxism? Is it wear? Is it bite? There are lots of indicators that the dentist can use to show the patient why he or she should maybe be thinking about different treatments . To me, this sort of patient interaction is huge! Everyone wants to know more about their health, and being able to present something like that image showing what the person’s mouth looks like gives people a chance to get involved in what they want as well.

Digital dentistry is going to change the way in which most patients interact with the dentist. Right now, I think that patients are blown away by intraoral scan images because they don’t realise that this technology exists.

In my, quite long, experience of the Middle East, the market was very complicated to break into. One of the first companies to really open the minds of distributors was Sirona. How important are dental distributors in the Middle East to Dentsply Sirona?

Dental distributors are really important to our business in the Middle East. The way we do business in the Middle East involves relying on them for distribution of our products. It’s really important that we partner closely with them so that we can get our products to dental professionals ultimatley this helps patients in the region.

Being more open-minded and future-oriented, seeing clear opportunities and considering how to adapt the business to fit the needs of the customers and the needs of the industry and what to change—we’re seeing all of that from all of our dealers. 

Dentsply Sirona World and the company’s  portfolio emphasise sustainability. How important is this for Dentsply Sirona now and in the future? What do you regard as your responsibility?

Sustainability is really important. As one of the leaders in the dental industry, we want to drive the change across the entire industry   regarding sustainability. We have launched our sustainability program “BEYOND: Taking action for a brighter world” in 2021 which outlines our commitment and identifies our sustainability goals. Overall, our aim is to ultimately integrate sustainability in everything we do and we strive to achieve this also in relation with our digital product innovations. Technology can support dental professionals to be more sustainable, and so the two things go hand in hand. Sustainability will be enhanced the more we drive digitisation, for example, by reducing waste through less paper and analogue x-ray use and also when we think of its social component, by increasing access to oral care.  I think that sustainability is only going to improve over time and that digital technology is an enabler of sustainability.