So What Did Happen To The £50M?

So What Did Happen To The £50M?

The announcement earlier this year of £50M to fund thousands upon thousands of urgent dental care appointments provided ministers and apologists with a perfect retort to fend off MPs and the public’s legitimate concerns about access to NHS dental services. How many patients it actually helped is rather more obscure.

The initiative asked dental practices to stay open ‘after hours’ or to open up at weekends to see patients in need who were not regular attenders of an NHS dental practice although the extra funds could be used to see existing patients with a qualifying emergency.

As concerned members of the public desperate for dental care approach their MPs, so those MPs have been tabling questions in Parliament in a bid to ascertain how many patients have been helped by the additional time limited budget (it expired on March 31st).

Judith Cummins, Labour MP for Bradford South sought to discover ‘how many additional urgent care appointments have been delivered through the £50 million catch up funding for NHS dentistry in January in (a) total and (b) each region of England.’

In a written reply, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Health and Social Care Maria Caulfield said “The Department of Health and Social Care has indicated that it will not be possible to answer this question within the usual time period. An answer is being prepared and will be provided as soon as it is available.”

The same reply was given to other MPs who sought to establish the efficacy of the additional funding in addressing the NHS dental crisis. In March, GDPUK approached the British Dental Association and NHS England for feedback on the additional funding initiative. The BDA had no data whilst NHSEng was ‘tight lipped’.


Comment:

It’s no secret that NHS dentistry is facing an access crisis and as GDPUK and others have reported, frustrated patients are beating an increasingly loud path to their MP’s surgeries.

Ministers and NHS managers can provide facts and figures for any number of metrics. So how come they can’t answer basic questions relating to the effectiveness of the £50M?

How much was used? How many practices signed up? How many ‘additional appointments’ were delivered?

If the scheme had been a resounding success, politicians would be seizing the figures to face down their opposition detractors. The fact that they have no figures and can’t answer basic questions suggests that most dental workers and practices were simply too tired and disillusioned to sign up.

So what did happen to the £50M?

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