Minister expresses ‘concern’ over recruitment of dentists
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- Published: Tuesday, 19 March 2019 08:44
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During a short debate on children’s oral health in the House of Lords, health minister, Baroness Blackwood, said There is a level of concern about recruitment and retention of dentists, and those difficulties needed to be addressed by NHS England. She was replying to an intervention by dentist Lord Colwyn who said that dentists’ morale was so low that every week practices were closing.
The short debate followed a question from Lib Dem peer Baroness Benjamin who asked what plans the Government had to tackle the oral health problems of hard to reach children, especially those in deprived areas of the country, through the Starting Well Core scheme. The newly ennobled minister Baroness (Nicola) Blackwood of North Oxford replied that the Starting Well Core scheme allows commissioners to establish schemes similar to the National Starting Well scheme. “Starting Well Core has a particular focus on children up to two years old; practices engage with a wide range of partners to promote the importance of early preventive care”, she said. Areas that have so far introduced the approach include London, the West Midlands, Shropshire and Staffordshire, Cheshire and Merseyside, and Greater Manchester.
Baroness Benjamin said that too many five to 10-year-olds in deprived areas undergo general anaesthetic in hospitals to have their decayed teeth removed. She welcomed t the Starting Well Core scheme as a first step towards ensuring that children are seen by a dentist, preventing them from developing decay at a young age. Unfortunately, she said, the scheme contained no educational element, only posters and leaflets available at dental practices, seen by those already attending. She claimed that there were no measures to get the hard-to-reach children through the dentist’s doors.
Lord Colwyn told the minister that: “we will not reduce oral health inequalities if we do not ensure that every child is able to get their free NHS dental check-up”. He said that dentists’ morale was so low that every week NHS dental practices are closing, ‘leaving some patients facing a 90-mile round trip to find a dentist’.
He continued: “A recent survey showed that three in five of all NHS dentists are planning to scale down or leave the NHS in the next five years.” Lord Colwyn laid the blame at Government funding which had fallen in real terms and the profession was still waiting for the rollout of the new dental contract, work on which started eight years ago. He concluded: “Programmes such as Starting Well Core will not able to help any children if there are no NHS dentists left to deliver them”.
The Minister replied that the Government wanted NHS dental services to be ‘attractive for the profession’ and they remained committed to reforming the dental contract. But, she said, the Government recognised that there were a range of reasons for contracts being handed back, ‘whether it is retirement, a decision to concentrate on private work or, in some cases, reorganisation of the companies providing the service’.
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