Dedication meets dental tech at the Finnish Dent Å clinic
Founded in 2024, the Finnish dental clinic Dent Å is relatively new in the Turku area, but has already claimed its place in the local landscape. The clinic’s 15 treatment rooms were all designed in cooperation with Plandent’s Finnish dental supply house as well as furnished with Planmeca’s top-of-the-line dental units and imaging systems. General dentist and one of the clinic’s co-founders, Dr Tuomas Tursas, describes how the new equipment and renovated space facilitate his daily work at the clinic.
Article Feb 23, 2026
Locals in Turku, Finland, got a reinforcement to their dental services when Dent Å opened for business in the heart of the city centre in 2024. The name not only calls back to the letter Å in the city’s Swedish name Åbo, but is first and foremost a reference to Aura å (“Aura River”), the Swedish name of the city’s famous river, which flows just a few dozen metres away from the clinic. Because Finland has two official languages, most places and landmarks in the country have both a Finnish and a Swedish name.
Set up in facilities which had previously served as a hotel, the clinic’s service offering covers all dental specialities, from general dentistry to endodontics, periodontics, implantology, orthodontics, and oral surgery. Additionally, the clinic employs dental hygienists, dental nurses, customer service professionals, as well as an equipment maintenance technician.
“We actually planned and built the whole clinic together with Plandent Finland,” says Dr Tuomas Tursas, a general dentist and one of Dent Å’s seven founding partners. He and the clinic’s other founders, Dr Olli-Pekka Packalen, Dr Julius Lyytikkä, Dr Kaisa Lyytikkä, Dr Jussi Samooja, Dr Lotta Samooja-Tähti, and Dr Joona Kangasniemi, are all working dentists at the clinic.
Plandent clinic design service – knowledge, knowhow, and quality
According to Dr Tursas, the plans for Dent Å started from scratch, with Plandent Finland onboard from early on. “The knowledge and knowhow that they were able to bring was actually pretty crucial as we were mapping out the floors, plumbing, electricals, and whatnot,” Tuomas describes. “It was essential that we had somebody with us who could look at these things and design them from the start, that was really great.”
The 15 new operatories were equipped with all the latest and greatest from Planmeca, including several modern Planmeca Compact™ i5 dental units and Planmeca ProX™ intraoral X-ray devices. For more demanding imaging needs, the clinic was also furnished with an extremely capable Planmeca Viso® G5 CBCT imaging system. The X-ray images are processed and analysed in the Romexis® all-in-one software.
The clinic project began in fall 2022, with renovations beginning in spring 2023. In 2024, the clinic finally opened its doors to the first customers.
Choosing Planmeca a “firm and unanimous decision”
According to Dr Tuomas Tursas, Planmeca felt like the intuitive choice for the new clinic from the outset. “That was of course the biggest decision – which dental unit we wanted to proceed with. At that point, everyone had already had some experience working with Planmeca units, so that was a clear starting point for us. In fact, any counteroffer would’ve had to have been pretty amazing for us to have chosen another manufacturer, that’s how firm and unanimous the decision was,” Dr Tursas explains.
Dr Tursas particularly enjoys how flexible it is to switch between left and right-handed work with Planmeca Compact i5, as well as the balanced and smooth movement of the instrument arms. “I think the instrument arms especially have always been one of the strongest assets of Planmeca units. They return to their positions really nicely, and I’ve never had any problems with them.” Dr Tursas also appreciates the softness of the Ultra Relax™ upholstery of the patient chair – a feature which has also been noted by patients.
At the same time, the new dental unit has also brought some more unexpected improvements to Dr Tursas daily workflow. “I’d never had a built-in screen in my dental unit before, but now I wouldn’t give it away for the world. Now, I can always see the oral status from the screen while I’m working, without the dental nurse having to describe it one detail at a time. It’s also more ergonomical not having to constantly turn your head back to look at a computer screen.”
Multidisciplinary approach yields the best results
As a dentist, much of the workday is typically spent interacting with different people, especially patients – but Dr Tursas says this suits him well. “I like being in direct contact with the customer, talking to patients and catching up with them – it keeps things interesting.”
At the same time, the multidisciplinary environment of the clinic enables consulting different specialists in-house – and learning new things while you’re at it. “For me, the best thing about this job is how versatile it is and how I’m always able to evolve and improve as a professional. You can’t stay still in this profession when everything else moves forward, and that’s the kind of challenge I enjoy,” Tuomas says.
“Here, more complex cases can be talked through in a group with, for example, a periodontist, prosthodontist, and me, where we all work together and look at the case from the perspective of our own specialisations. That’s how you get the best results – which is of course always the goal for us at Dent Å.”
Copy: Aleksandra Nyholm
Images: Dino Azinur and courtesy of Dent Å
