Deaths linked to mouth cancer warns Portman Dental Care chief
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- Published: Sunday, 24 May 2020 20:35
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Sam Waley-Cohen, a former Cheltenham Gold Cup-winning jockey who launched Portman Dental Care 11 years ago, has told The Sunday Telegraph that deaths linked to mouth cancer will rise due to the Government's ongoing refusal to let dentists reopen. He is predicting a wider healthcare crisis caused by up to 10 million missed appointments.
Mr Waley-Cohen said: "The risks are threefold. "One of the things dentists do is diagnose mouth cancer - that’s a big risk. The second risk is as you get mouth infections, the pain and discomfort stops you from being able to eat, so nutrition declines. It has a very close relationship with other healthcare problems. The third is children's oral care, which is really really important to establish when they’re young."
NHS England held meetings with dental leaders this week, but gave no assurances on a timeline for reopening. Martin Woodrow, chief executive of the British Dental Association, said "nothing's really changed" for the industry even though Boris Johnson has begun easing lockdown measures elsewhere.
No specific date has been set for a return and Mr Waley-Cohen, whose £300 million business has more than 100 practices across the UK, cannot understand why. "We’re probably one of the safest places you could get to, because the sterilisation procedures are already incredibly high," he said.
"Every practice has a full sterilisation room, where all the equipment is sterilised after every treatment," he added. "After the various scares, particularly the HIV scare, the standards of inspectorate went up a lot, so there’s a regulation which sets out sterilisation protocols at practices, and that’s then regulated by the CQC, so they inspect practices. Nurses and dentists already wear PPE - so the face masks and goggles, that’s what PPE is... and then after every appointment, the surgery is fully wiped down and cleaned, fully sterilised.
"That’s been taken up even further, so now the level of PPE is even higher, so wearing fluid-resistant gowns and visors in practice. Making sure that we’re doing things like medical histories the day before the patient turns up so that we can risk assess. Dentists are obviously medically trained, so risk assess for anybody who might have Covid-19, temperature testing, making sure that when people arrive at practice that there’s no waiting time in waiting rooms, so the whole protocols have already taken what was set up in an environment to deal with airborne disease and moved them up a whole other level."
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