Minister's Map: Deception over Dental Access

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Published: Tuesday, 16 April 2024 09:57
Written by Peter Ingle
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Minister’s Map: Deception over Dental Access

The NHS dentistry access crisis and the accompanying awful headlines, have dogged the government and a succession of health ministers for a few years. But according to Victoria Atkins, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, things are now getting a lot better.

Brave words, reallocation of existing funds, threats, and minor changes to the broken contract, have all been tried, and failed. Ministerial hopes had shifted to raising an army of upskilled and empowered DCP’s as well as pulling in overseas graduates, to try and plug the holes. But that all takes time, and an election looms. Given the government’s stream of misleading statements about dentistry, it is no surprise that they have once again resorted to some sleight of hand.  

A recent posting on X by Victoria Atkins claimed that the dental recovery plan was working and that nearly 500 more practices are accepting new adult patients compared to the end of January. It was illustrated by a map of England showing those practices continuing to accept new patients as well as those that had now started to accept new patients. As it switched from those accepting in January to those now accepting, it was was liberally covered with extra dots including most of the notorious dental deserts. The Minister closed her posting with: “Ignore the naysayers, we are getting on with delivering for you.”

Those with genuine knowledge of dental access soon commented.

Picking up on the advice “to ignore the naysayers,” Specialist in dental public health, Sam Shah, described the Minister as “deluded.” The digital expert also offered to explain the data flows to her.

BDA Chair Eddie Crouch posted that he was frustrated that the search for solutions to dentistry’s problems were “often conflated with statistics and funding that fail scrutiny.”

Paul Woodhouse, GDP and regular media spokesperson for the profession, commented that he had called some of the “available” practices in his area and been told that they were not taking new patients. He explained that changing availability status was an NHSE condition for claiming the new patient premium, and pointed out that overall new patient numbers would actually drop as a result of the scheme.

A Dental Nurse working in Maxillo Facial practice, commented that NHS find a dentist had provided long lists of practices that she had given to patients, but when called none had availability. She had spotted that the criteria for being on this map had been changed to “when availability allows.”

And that was how NHS dental access had been transformed. Not with contract change, not with extra funding, not following discussions with the profession, but by insisting that practices update their data, and changing the criteria for inclusion.

Older readers will recall the reports of hasty meetings following premier Tony Blair’s off the cuff promise to provide accessible NHS dentistry, where the overriding debate was how far away a practice could be, and still described as accessible.

Politicians and managers believe that they can solve the access crisis with a dictionary, and avoid difficult conversations with the public. An increasingly disenchanted and public will see through this very quickly.

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