Access Crisis Latest: Five Million Calls To NHS111
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- Published: Tuesday, 09 April 2024 09:41
- Written by Guy Tuggle
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NHS111 has handled nearly five million dental related calls over the past five years figures sourced from the Government by the Labour Party have revealed.
The NHS111 phone line is a first port of call for the public when concerned about a symptom not bad enough to warrant a 999 call. Trained operators give advice and, where necessary, signpost or urge callers to see a Dr, dentist, pharmacist or A&E department.
Many patients who are not registered with a dentist call NHS111 when they experience pain and most practices play a recorded message when closed advising patients with an out-of-hours emergency to call NHS111.
The service is sometimes able to make an appointment for a patient to be seen at an ’urgent care’ provider, however, as many practice reception teams and managers will testify, many callers are simply given the names of local dental practices and told to call round.
For many, this is a fruitless exercise and where a patient is experiencing genuine pain enquiries can become increasingly bad tempered.
NHS111 was especially busy during the pandemic, when practices were closed. In the year 2019-20 740,000 people were triaged, rising to 1,096,041 during the year of lockdowns 2020-21.
In the year 2023-24 NHS111 averaged 3237 calls each day related to dental pain.
The disclosure of these figures provides new evidence of how desperate the NHS dental access crisis has become and was seized on by Labour’s Shadow Health Spokesman Wes Streeting.
"The sky rocketing number of 111 calls shows the Tories’ destruction on NHS dentistry is putting the rest of the NHS under greater pressure" said Streeting.
Andrea Leadsom, for the government, said that the Dental Reform Plan was putting an additional £200M into the service (NB this is NOT new money as the Minster finally admitted in Parliament) which would help increase the number of appointments.
Both politicians claimed their approach would create additional appointments, Labour 700,000, the Conservatives ’up to 2.5 million additional appointments’. But as everyone in the profession knows, without a workforce to deliver them, these projections are no more than pipe dreams.
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