Dental deserts will be targeted with hundreds of thousands of emergency dental appointments from April.
In a win for the Mirror ’s Dentists for All campaign the Government has announced 700,000 people living in pain will get seen by an NHS dentist. It has written to the NHS to instruct it to stand up the extra urgent appointments in areas where patients particularly struggle to access NHS dentists, such as Norfolk and Waveney, where there are just 31 NHS dentists for every 100,000 people – way below the national average.
It comes after the Mirror revealed a host of stories about people forced to yank out their own teeth because they cannot access an NHS dentist.
Writing for the Mirror, dentistry minister Stephen Kinnock said: “Today we’re taking the first bold steps on the road to recovery for our broken NHS dental sector. By rolling out an extra 700,000 urgent appointments to all parts of the country, we’re ensuring patients can get the treatment they need, when they need it. And by putting more appointments in the ‘dental deserts’ where demand is highest, we’re getting help to people who need it most.”
The extra emergency appointments will be for patients who are likely to be in pain including those suffering from infections or needing urgent repairs to a bridge.
Mr Kinnock added: “The Mirror’s Dentists for All campaign has exposed the appalling state NHS dentistry has been left in by the Conservatives and highlighted these dreadful accounts of patients forced to take matters into their own hands.”
The Government says it is a “first step towards rebuilding NHS dentistry” but dentists are warning the plan does not come with a commitment of additional funding from the Treasury. Without it, the British Dental Association says, the “budget that should be funding routine dental care is being recycled”.
Shiv Pabary, chair of the BDA’s General Dental Practice Committee said: “Promised new money has gone. Instead, the budget that should be funding routine care is being recycled. What’s clear to us is the Treasury are banking on the crisis in dentistry not being solved in this Parliament.”
The BDA last week provided evidence to a Parliamentary inquiry showing how a decade of Government funding “cuts with no precedent anywhere in the NHS” mean dentists make a loss on many procedures. It calculates dentists who remain seeing NHS patients will have to subsidise this work with a total of £425 million from their private work during the next financial year.
The £3 billion NHS dentistry budget for England has seen a £1 billion real terms cut over the last decade due to inflation. Overall it has remained flat despite population growth. The BDA estimates the budget is only enough to fund care for less than half the population.
It calculates the 700,000 extra urgent appointments equate to each of the 24,200 listed NHS dentists in England seeing a little over two extra urgent cases a month on average. BDA analysis of the last GP Survey suggests 13 million people in England have an unmet need for NHS dentistry.
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Everyone should have access to an NHS dentist
More than 12 million people were unable to access NHS dental care last year – more than 1 in 4 adults in England. At the same time 90% of dental practices are no longer accepting new NHS adult patients. Data from the House of Commons Library showed 40% of children didn’t have their recommended annual check-up last year.
Restore funding for dental services and recruit more NHS dentists
The UK spends the smallest proportion of its heath budget on dental care of any European nation. Government spending on dental services in England was cut by a quarter in real terms between 2010 and 2020. The number of NHS dentists is down by more than 500 to 24,151 since the pandemic.
Change the contracts
A Parliamentary report by the Health Select Committee has branded the current NHS dentists’ contracts as “not fit for purpose” and described the state of the service as “unacceptable in the 21st century”. The system effectively sets quotas on the maximum number of NHS patients a dentist can see as it caps the number of procedures they can perform each year. Dentists also get paid the same for delivering three or 20 fillings, often leaving them out of pocket. The system should be changed so it enables dentists to treat on the basis of patient need.
Have you had to resort to drastic measures because you couldn’t access an NHS dentist? Are you a parent struggling to get an appointment for a child? Email martin.bagot@mirror.co.uk or call 0800 282591
Shiv Pabary added: “This announcement is progress but the Government could have fired the starting gun on commissioning urgent care last summer. Action here will translate into just two extra slots a month for each NHS dentist. Ministers must now confront the failed contract that’s left millions with no options.”
Labour have vowed to tackle the “flawed” NHS dental contract but the BDA says it has made “no progress” since entering government last year. The contract means many NHS procedures are done at a loss, meaning practices may struggle to find dentists willing to fit in this work around their private patients.
Practices have a set number of units of dental activity (UDAs) they are expected to do. They are paid no extra if they do more and tens of thousands of pounds can be clawed back by the NHS if they do less. This has meant almost a third of the NHS dental budget is having to be returned as “underspends” in some areas – despite there being huge unmet need for dental care.
These fines then make it harder for practices to fund recruitment of more dentists and contributes to a vicious cycle which sees more give up and move into more lucrative private work. The government plans to use these underspends, which equate to hundreds of millions of pounds in England, to pay existing dentists to up the NHS work they carry out and provide these extra urgent appointments.
The BDA argues this “underspend” should go towards routine appointments and additional funding should be provided for the 700,000 extra urgent appointments. A government source admitted the extra appointments would be funded “at least in part by the underspend”. It is understood negotiations on NHS contract reform cannot begin in earnest until the Treasury agrees a budgetary framework.
NHS England has written to integrated care boards (ICB) across the country, instructing bosses to stand up thousands of urgent appointments over the coming year. It comes after it emerged the Tories’ “new patient premium” introduced last year cost the taxpayer £88 million but the number of new patients accessing NHS dentists actually fell by 3%.
Jason Wong, the Chief Dental Officer for England said: “Dentists are working hard to help as many patients as possible but too many people experience difficulties in accessing NHS dental services. It is vital that we do more to improve access – we are working with local systems to prioritise this.”
Emergency tooth extractions remain the number one reason children aged 5-9 years old are admitted to hospital.
Jacob Lant, chief executive of National Voices group of charities, said: “NHS dentistry has been left in a sorry state, with far too many people experiencing pain and discomfort because they can’t access basic care. These extra urgent appointments will be welcome and are a helpful first step, but fixing the nation’s oral health crisis will require a sustained effort.”
Stephen Kinnock MP, Minister of State for Care, with responsibility for dentistry, said:
Today we’re taking the first bold steps on the road to recovery for our broken NHS dental sector. By rolling out an extra 700,000 urgent appointments to all parts of the country, we’re ensuring patients can get the treatment they need, when they need it.
And by putting more appointments in the “dental deserts” where demand is highest, we’re getting help to people who need it most. People like Chris Lanston, a 50-year-old dad forced to pull out a loose tooth with pliers after enduring six months of pain because he couldn’t get an NHS dentist appointment.
Or pensioner Marina Chaplin, who pulled out two of her own teeth and had to take out a bank loan to get private treatment because there was no NHS dentist available. And these horror stories are before you even get to the many people desperately queuing, sometimes right around the block, just hoping to be seen.
The Mirror’s Dentists for All campaign has exposed the appalling state NHS dentistry has been left in by the Conservatives and highlighted these dreadful accounts of patients forced to take matters into their own hands.
It’s been revealed just this week that that Tories spent an eye-watering £88 million on their “new patient premium” in 2024, but it didn’t do anything for patients. In fact, less new patients got to see an NHS dentist.
Enough is enough. The rot and the waste stops here. We’re kicking off delivering our manifesto commitment with 700,000 extra urgent appointments – but this is just the start.
We will implement fundamental changes to get the sector back on its feet as we deliver on our Plan for Change and revive the sector for patients and staff. Our plans include reforming the dental contract to make NHS work more appealing to dentists and increase capacity for more patients.
And we will soon announce plans to introduce supervised toothbrushing for 3 to 5-year-olds at schools and nurseries in deprived areas to give all children a better chance of good oral health.
These plans mean better outcomes for children living in some of the most deprived areas of the country, where as many as one in three 5-year-olds have experienced tooth decay. We’ll be doing more too to shift dental care towards prevention rather than treatment.
Recruiting and retaining many more dentists, particularly in underserved areas, is another challenge to overcome.
Until now, access to NHS dentistry in England has been a lottery, with 1 in 4 patients who tried to see an NHS dentist in the past two years unable to do so. Tackling these problems will take time – but today’s announcement is an important step. We came into government promising to end this misery.
Today shows once again that this Labour government is delivering with the change our country deserves to see.
