Times Journalist’s outspoken appeal for NHS Dentistry
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- Published: Wednesday, 09 March 2022 07:57
- Written by Guy Tuggle
- Hits: 1902
The veteran Radio 4 presenter turned Times journalist Libby Purves OBE used her Times newspaper column (Monday 7th March) to throw her weight behind the tidal wave of concern surrounding the state of NHS dentistry.
In a feature entitled ‘Failing dentistry will come back to bite us’, Purves argued that ‘without a fairer funding system for NHS practices and more dentists, the nation’s rotting teeth are storing up trouble’.
More than six million citizens have no NHS dentist and can’t get one the article argues, using figures that sound conservative in their estimation of the scale of the problem given that the prevailing accusation is that the government only funds NHS dentistry for 52% of the population. ‘The risk of mouth cancers, appalling abscesses and desperate medieval measures is not small’ Ms Purves says.
Quoting figures from Healthwatch that revealed in 2019 that nine out of ten calls were about ‘the impossibility of finding a dental surgery’ Purves cited a practice in a county town local to her home which, having announced that it would be ‘taking names from 09.00 on a particular day’ saw whole families forming queues before dawn. This conjures up images not seen since the first morning of the NHS on 5th July 1948 when GPs and dentists arrived at work to be greeted by queues of never- before-seen patients desperate for attention.
As has been reported on GDPUK and elsewhere, local news media are today full of accounts from frustrated members of the public, many with tales of extreme pain to endure or hefty bills for private appointments in the absence of any NHS care. MPs, meanwhile, have confirmed that NHS dental access problems dominate their constituency correspondence.
Purves argued that the contract rewards a fifteen minutes check up at the same rate as treatment taking considerably longer and referenced numerous other arguments familiar to the profession to conclude that what the system achieves is the exact opposite of ‘levelling up’. She also reminds readers that dentists practise a "technical, specialist and highly skilled" branch of surgery.
Damningly, her the Times article observed that contractual issues aside, the nature of the work constituted ‘a treadmill of regular work means little opportunity to “upskill”, little job satisfaction and exhaustion”.
As NHS managers and the BDA wrestle over funding priorities and the long awaited bonfire of UDAs their deliberations can do little or nothing to address the nature of the work itself. And therein, perhaps, lies one of the biggest elephants in the surgery.
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