Foreign health professionals are giving Swedes frustrated with long queues and worsening service in public healthcare the cheap private-sector alternative many have been looking for.

Like "the Polish plumber", who in France has come to symbolize the challenges of low-cost services from new EU members, Swedes are grappling with the phenomenon of Polish dentists and Thai doctors, who are offering services at half the cost of their Swedish competitors.

While Stockholmers with toothaches are flocking to "City Dental", which opened earlier this month in the heart of the capital and is staffed entirely by Polish dentists, not everyone is happy.

"Is this the beginning of the end for the Swedish model?" asked Marja Torsteinsrud, a dentist from Vaesteraas, west of Stockholm, in an irate letter to the Dagens Nyheter daily this week. "In the short term the winners are those who buy services cheaply, but in the end only businessmen and profiteers will benefit."

"It's a challenge," admitted Ingemar Olsson, spokesman for the Swedish health ministry.

"But the government has always said that it welcomes competition when it happens in a fair way, according to the laws," he told AFP.

Reports have suggested that the team of Polish dentists would leave Sweden before six months are up to avoid paying Sweden's exorbitant taxes and social charges, to be replaced with a fresh team, which will also stay for just six months, and so on.

Swedish healthcare officials may well find ways to curb the Polish dentists, by forcing them to fill in patients' reports in Swedish or invoking "patient security" which requires a relationship with the same dentist for longer than a few months.

But the cost challenge remains, and while Olsson called the six-month rotation plan "troublesome" and "clearly against the spirit of the law", he admitted it was probably not illegal.

Within weeks of the Polish dentists arriving, a hospital in Thailand opened up an information centre this week in Stockholm to persuade Swedes to travel to Thailand for private care and skip long public sector queues at home.

"In Sweden, the waiting period for an operation or treatment can be anywhere from two to 80 weeks," Leif Erre, the head of the Swedish company RelaxU which is organizing the trips, told AFP.

After thousands of Swedes were caught up in the December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, which killed a total of 543 of the country's nationals, the Bangkok Phuket Hospital hopes to build on the good reputation it earned in Sweden after the catastrophe.

Swedes taking up the offer will have to foot the entire bill for travel, accommodation and treatment themselves but this may still be cheaper than the private sector prices at home.

While for example private sector laser eye surgery in Sweden costs about 12,000 kronor (1,500 dollars, 1,300 euros) per eye, the cost in Thailand is 14,500 kronor for both eyes.

Olsson shrugged off the Thai initiative, pointing out that Swedes are already guaranteed treatment for non-urgent medical conditions within three months of diagnosis.

There was no need to travel abroad "except for things like plastic surgery to look more beautiful. If people want to go to Thailand for that, it's up to them. It's cheaper and they also get a nice holiday," he said.

The lure of lower costs elsewhere not only affects ordinary citizens but even the social services themselves.

In Stockholm's city hall, experts are mulling a plan to open a rehabilitation centre for young drug addicts in Latvia, staffed by Swedes and Latvians and treating addicts from both countries.

Ostensibly the centre would be part of a strategy to treat the drug problem in cooperation with other countries on the rim of the Baltic, a major route for drug traffickers.

But sending Swedish patients to a foreign low-cost EU country for treatment and effectively moving healthcare jobs abroad has stoked Swedish fears about social dumping.

"Of course this is very controversial, and no political decision has been taken, but I think personally that one fine day this centre will be built," Justus Bergsten, division chief at Stockholm social services, told AFP.

Despite the controversy, the challenge to the Swedish healthcare model "should not be exaggerated", the health ministry's Olsson said.

"The real challenges are political, for example if the conservatives win the next election and start privatizing hospitals. That would be a real threat," he said.

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