Dental Access and UDA’s Raised Again
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- Published: Wednesday, 19 January 2022 08:26
- Written by Peter Ingle
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Once again questions about the lack of access to NHS dentistry are becoming a recurring feature in parliament. And now it seems that even the government and its supporters are blaming the UDA system.
First to raise the issue during Questions in the Health and Social Care debate was Derek Thomas, Conservative MP for St Ives since 2015. After describing the serious access problems in his constituency he pressed the minister for news of contract reform.
In response Maria Caulfield, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Patient Safety and Primary Care thanked him for “getting to the nub of the problem” - the UDA contract.
She stated that the contract contained perverse disincentives but the good news was that the government had already started work on reforming it.
The Under-Secretary was quick to remind parliament that the offending contract that dates back to 2006 had been introduced by a Labour government.
While the Government seems to accept the fact that the UDA contract is unfit for purpose may relieve his local dentists, Derek Thomas’s assertion that the problems were not due to funding, Covid or a lack of dentists may not have been so reassuring. Adding to the emphasis on UDAs as the problem, he stated on his twitter account that he had asked the Health Minister Maria Caulfield, “how the Government is going to change the way dentists are paid for their work. There’s a real problem with getting access to an NHS dentist in Cornwall because the NHS dental contract is not fit for purpose.”
Next came Sir Robert Goodwill, the Conservative MP and former junior Minister who has represented Scarborough and Whitby since 2005. He said that the situation in his constituency was no better than St Ives. There were he claimed “thousands of UDAs going unused”, adding that “Dentists tell me that what would help is to have a date for an end to the UDA system”.
Responding to this Maria Caulfield was quick to condemn the “disastrous” 2006 contract. She went on to reassure Sir Robert that following the handing back of a contract in Scarborough, a procurement process was taking place to commission services to start this summer.
Local BDA spokesman Mark Green recently described the situation as “dreadful” and put the inequalities down to the current NHS contract. “If you remember back in 2004 we had the queues in Scarborough that were going around the block and that got onto national news. We had new contracts come in two years after that – and that’s the problem. Tying in with the recent estimates of around 1000 more dentists leaving NHS work”. He added: “Anecdotally there’s been about 80 contracts handed back at the end of 2020 because they just cannot make it work,” and that “Covid has shone a spotlight on the contract.”
Later, Eddie Crouch Chair of the BDA commenting on twitter wrote that he was happy to pick up with Maria Caulfield following on from discussions before Christmas. This received a like from the Under-Secretary’s account.
Thanks to @DerekThomasUK MP for speaking out on the crisis facing dental patients across England.
— BDA (@TheBDA) January 18, 2022
Reform has been pledged by April 2022.
Failure to make a decisive break from a discredited NHS contract will further impact millions of patients already unable to access care. pic.twitter.com/jZsrMiDHzf
Lets talk NHS funding of dentistry not detail of contracts
The problem with NHS dentistry is that its only funded to meet the needs of 55% of the population and COVID has further restricted this access. UDAs are crap and the contract is crap but no new contract without additional funding of capacity gets beyond the problem. Public don't understand a conversation about UDAs but they can understand repeating again and again that NHS dentistry including patient fees is only designed to meet needs of 55% of the population.You need to be logged in to leave comments.
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