Dentistry remains a priority for the NHS and I am very pleased Primary Care and Community Care Team at NHS England are doing all they can to address the challenges facing the service at the moment.
I receive a small but regular number of emails from constituents who are frustrated they cannot access dental care in the way they would like, and I and my Parliamentary colleagues have regularly raised these concerns with NHS England.
The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on dentistry services did not help provision, with dentists being one of the last health services to be able to offer its usual level of treatment due to the close work and danger of Covid-infection involved.
NHS England has now enacted the first substantial reforms to the NHS dental contract in 16 years, bringing in a series of initial changes that are already making a difference to patient’s and dentists’ experience of the service.
These include increasing dental capacity by making dental therapists, as well as dentists, able to accept patients for NHS treatments, providing fillings, sealants, preventative care for adults and children. This will free up dentists’ time for urgent and complex cases, as well as treating children.
Through the hard work of the profession, these changes mean we are starting to see the early signs of recovery in dentistry. However, access to vital services in some parts of the country is still challenging. NHS England is now focussing on supporting patients who don’t currently have access to an NHS dentist, improving the payment system to dentists to support higher needs patients, and supporting the professional development of dental teams to help make the NHS a rewarding place to practice dentistry.
