The Daily Telegraph has claimed that dental patients are being put at risk of infection by dentists ‘who fail to clean surgical equipment properly.’ Using freedom of information requests the paper reports that one in nine practices inspected by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) was found to be in breach of Department of Health guidelines on cross infection control.

West Midlands dentist Joyce Trail has been jailed for seven years for conspiracy to defraud, Her offences mainly involved denture work for older people in care homes.. Between 2006 and 2009 she submitted 7,000 invoices for work she had never done, 100 of which were for patients who were actually dead. She managed to extract £1.4 million from the NHS through fraud.

Around 25 further dental practices are set to be added to the existing 70 programmes as work continues to develop the new contract.  

The extra sites will help fine tune different parts of the new contract which will see dentists paid for the number of patients they care for and the health results they produce rather than the number of courses of treatment they perform. The 25 new pilot sites will join the scheme from April 2013.

The launch of a new business model for dentistry has been celebrated with the signing of the first practice in the UK to adopt the scheme.  The ‘Partnership’ model offers dental professionals the opportunity to recapture their aspirations to provide consistency and high quality patient care which is often compromised by the pressures and constraints caused by red tape and bureaucracy.

Fewer than half (43%) of UK workers are given time off by their employers to visit their dentist, potentially putting their oral health at severe risk, the British Dental Health Foundation has warned. The situation is even worse for parents, with just one worker in four allowed to take paid time off work to take their children to the dentist, added the organisation.