Lord Colwyn speaks up for dentistry
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- Published: Monday, 12 September 2016 07:53
- Written by News Editor
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Retired dentist, Lord Colwyn, was speaking in a debate on the NHS in the House of Lords. He stressed the importance to the ‘long-term sustainability of the NHS of improving the nation’s oral health and ensuring good dental care’. He raised the issues of people visiting their GP with toothache and the high number of children be admitted to hospitals for extortions.
Lord Colwyn told fellow peers about research carried out by the British Dental Association, showing that 600,000 people a year seek help with toothache from their GPs ‘who are neither qualified nor set up to deal with dental issues’. This was putting unnecessary pressure on the system, costing the NHS at least £26 million a year and wasting GPs’ time, resulting in longer waits for people whom they can really help.
He said that people were doing this ‘because of the chronic underfunding of NHS dentistry and constantly increasing dental patient charges’. These fees had gone up by 5% this year and were increasing by a further 5% next year. He argued that this ‘unprecedented increase’ will discourage patients who most need to see the dentist from going to see one. He added that this latest research clearly shows that it also puts an ‘avoidable burden on the rest of the already-strained NHS’.
He reminded the House that although NHS care was supposed to be ‘free at the point of use’, the latest increase means patients now cover 26% of their NHS dentistry costs—up by more than a third compared with a decade ago. He said that if this trend continued it would take just 15 years before patients pay for most of their treatment. This had to be set against the backdrop of £170 million of NHS dentistry funding having been cut by the Government since 2010, with patient charges increasingly used to make up the shortfall.
He continued by saying that neglecting oral health puts pressure ‘on not only our general practitioners but our hospitals’. The number of people going to A&E with emergency dental problems has been rising sharply and tens of thousands of people continue to be admitted for scheduled tooth extractions.
Lord Colwyn concluded: “It is frankly a scandal that tooth extractions under general anaesthesia remain the number one reason for hospital admissions in young children, with 160 youngsters and their parents going through this painful and stressful procedure, which is not without its risks, every day.
“The cost of these completely preventable treatments has gone up by more than 60% in the past four years and now stands at £35 million a year. Again, it is the kind of avoidable pressure our struggling hospitals could really do without. We simply cannot continue to treat oral health as separate and inferior to other areas of health, neglecting prevention and reducing NHS dentistry funding while topping it up with inflated patient charges.
“It is not only bad for people’s dental and general health; it is also a false economy that puts unnecessary strain on our GPs and hospitals. It is an important part of our health service which we must not overlook when discussing the long-term sustainability of the NHS.”
The debate was initiated by a Labour peer, Viscount Hanworth, on the impact of the Health and Social Care Act 2012 on the current performance of the National Health Service and its future sustainability. He opened the debate by saying: “My Lords, the very existence of the NHS is in danger, as is the principle of a universal healthcare provision free at the point of delivery. The NHS is being turned into a market-based system. The proponents of these changes envisage that the system will be financed by private insurance policies that will allow individual policyholders to determine the extent of their insurance cover and the level of care to which they will be entitled. The services will be provided by commercial organisations under the rubric of the NHS.”
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