Can You Use Air Polishing on Implants?

The 2024 ADA Health Policy Institute data is unambiguous: only 60% of US dentists have adequate hygienist staffing, and 91.7% of those actively recruiting describe the process as "very" or "extremely" challenging. Read alongside the global dental air-polishing market — projected USD 953.98 million in 2026 with a 5.94% CAGR through 2035 — and a coherent picture emerges. Equipment investments that reduce chair time and increase per-hygienist productivity are no longer optional optimisations; they are direct responses to a structural workforce constraint.

The shortage in numbers

Per the American Dental Association's Health Policy Institute (HPI), the US dental hygienist shortage is structural rather than cyclical. The headline figures from the 2024 workforce report:

• Only 60% of dentists report adequate hygienist staffing. Forty per cent are running understaffed.
• 33.9% of dentists were recruiting or had recently recruited a hygienist in Q3 2024.
• Among those recruiting, 91.7% described the process as "very challenging" or "extremely challenging". A separate survey reported 72.5% indicating "extreme difficulty".
• The 2022 ADA HPI / ADHA joint workforce report framed the issue as a retention crisis, not a supply crisis. Chronic drivers of departure include negative workplace culture, insufficient compensation, lack of growth opportunity, inadequate benefits, feeling overworked, and communication failures.
• 62% of dental hygienists report that greater clinical autonomy would increase retention, pointing to a workforce that values self-directed practice.

The pattern is qualitatively similar across most Western European markets, though granular percentages are nation-specific. The European hygienist shortage is widely documented in dental trade press but rarely quantified at the ADA HPI level of detail.

Why this matters for prophylaxis equipment buying

When each hygienist hour is harder to secure and harder to retain, every operational choice that increases output per chair-hour translates directly to clinic economics. Air polishing systems — particularly the combined tabletop systems that integrate ultrasonic scaling and air polishing in one unit — sit at the intersection of three productivity levers:

• Shorter procedure time: per the umbrella review evidence in our patient comfort review, air-polishing-based supportive periodontal therapy is comparable in clinical outcomes to conventional methods while delivering shorter clinical time.
• Lower physical strain: hygienists routinely report less hand and wrist fatigue with air polishing versus hand instrumentation, reducing one of the chronic drivers of burnout.
• Onboarding speed: simpler operatory layouts (single combined tabletop instead of two separate devices) shorten the ramp-up for new and locum hires.

None of these advantages is clinical-superiority — the evidence is consistent that air polishing is comparable, not superior, to traditional scaling/root planing for clinical outcomes. The advantages are operational. In a labour market where filling the next hygienist seat takes months, operational matters.

The market growth picture

On the demand side, the underlying air-polishing equipment market is growing in step with this labour pressure. Per Precedence Research, the global dental air-polishing systems market is projected at USD 953.98 million in 2026 and USD 1,603.54 million by 2035, implying a 5.94% CAGR. Tabletop air-polishing units (the equipment category most relevant to combined-workflow practices) account for roughly 60% of segment revenue.

Europe sits in the middle of the global growth pattern — slower than Asia-Pacific (CAGR ~6.5%) but with a more mature installed base. Within Europe, growth is concentrated in Spain, Portugal, and the CEE Baltics, while Germany and Italy run at replacement-cycle volumes. This regional skew matters because the hygienist shortage hits private-practice-heavy markets first — the same markets driving air-polishing equipment growth.

The connected-workflows angle

Two adjacent trends compound the prophylaxis-investment thesis:

1. Dentsply Sirona's February 2026 Return-to-Growth Action Plan redirected approximately USD 120 million in annualised cost savings into "innovation, clinical education, and sales team focused on connected dentistry," with new distribution partnerships across Patterson Dental, Benco Dental, Burkhart Dental Supply and A-dec. 2. Straumann Group's FY 2025 results (CHF 2.6 billion, +8.9% organic growth) emphasised continued expansion of the Straumann AXS cloud-based platform alongside the SIRIOS X3 intraoral scanner launch and ClearCorrect growth.

Neither company is primarily a prophylaxis vendor, but both signal that the broader dental hardware market is being repositioned around connected workflows. Air-polishing equipment — particularly the EMS GBT Machine with its EMS Partner 2.0 dashboard and the NSK Varios Combi Pro2 with Bluetooth foot control — is following that pattern. For procurement teams, the question is no longer "should we invest in air polishing?" but "which platform aligns with our practice's connected-workflow direction?"

What this means for clinics

The procurement framing has shifted. Where the question used to be "is air polishing clinically better than ultrasonic scaling?" (the honest answer being: comparable, not superior), the operational question is now: "given the hygienist labour market and the connected-workflows direction, what equipment best protects per-hygienist productivity over a 5-to-7-year horizon?"

The 2026 buyer's guide covers the 14 specific systems and their European pricing in depth; the practical heuristics from a workforce-pressure standpoint:

• High-volume practices: combined tabletop systems (EMS, Mectron, NSK, Woodpecker, Acteon OPUS) eliminate dual-device setup. Capital-intensive but operationally efficient.
• Multi-operatory clinics with locum hygienists: simpler, more standardised systems (handpieces with clearer training paths) reduce onboarding friction.
• Practices in shortage-acute regions: connected-workflow platforms (EMS GBT Machine + EMS Partner 2.0; NSK Varios Combi Pro2 + Bluetooth pedal) offer remote service and remote diagnostics that reduce downtime when a single hygienist outage matters more.

The ADA HPI position framing the issue as retention — not supply — is operationally important. Practices investing in equipment that reduces hygienist physical strain and onboarding friction are investing in retention as much as in throughput.