BDA’s Shawn Charlwood Lays It On The Line To Commons

BDA’s Shawn Charlwood Lays It On The Line To Commons

BDA General Dental Practice Committee Chair Shawn Charlwood, told MPs at the Health and Social Care inquiry into Recruitment and Retention Across Healthcare the stark realties facing NHS dentistry when he and colleagues, including Eddie Crouch, met them this week.

In an e-mail sent to BDA members on 26th May Charlwood reported back to the membership “I was honoured to be given the opportunity to express the frustration that thousands of dentists are feeling across the country in Parliament. I warned of the growing exodus, and that inaction from government will mean the death of NHS dentistry.

Dr Charlwood told the committee he had “never known dentistry this bad in my 35 years of practising” and relayed how a newly qualified dentist had told him that “saddled with £70,000 of student debt …. he earned only £9 for a whole day’s work due to the UDA system: "I don’t hate my job" he said, "I hate not getting paid for all the work I’m doing."

The committee was told that morale was at rock bottom, 3000 dentists had left the NHS over the past couple of years and many more were on the cusp of doing so. "Ministers can try and fill this leaky bucket, or they can get on and fix it.”

Patients, Dr Charlwood said, were resorting to pulling their own teeth and this, in 2022, represented a step back to Victorian days and was unacceptable.

In an especially emotive exchange, Dr Charlwood told Jeremy Hunt and the committee “dentists feel like they’ve been chewed up and spat out” by the target driven UDA contract. "Dentists can’t see a light at the end of the tunnel and are voting with their feet."

“Morale among NHS dentists is at an all-time low and I told the Committee that dentists are not leaving for money, they are leaving because they can’t provide the level of care they want for their patients. The quality of care they believe every patient deserves” Charlwood noted.

“Every dentist lost to the workforce and every vacancy that remains unfilled means thousands more patients losing access.”

Chair Jeremy Hunt asked Dr Charlwood if dentistry had descended to ’rationing’ by the back door?  Charlwood replied “It was a simple yes from me, and the patients who lose out most are the patients that need us most. The higher needs, irregular attenders, often from areas of high deprivation. It’s a system that works for the Treasury when it comes to keeping costs down, but it means practices can’t open where there’s demand, successful ones cannot expand, it caps access and propagates inequalities of health.

Prevention should not be an afterthought. We have made it clear what we want: a commitment to a timeline when a new contract will be rolled out and an immediate and long-term increase of financial investment into NHS dentistry.

I told the Committee that dentists’ take-home pay has fallen by 40 per cent in real terms in the decade from 2010/11. In real terms net government spend on general dental practice in England was cut by over a quarter between 2010 and 2020, and we estimate £880 million of additional funding per annum would be required simply to restore financial resources to 2010 levels.”

Dr Charlwood concluded his written feedback to members by stating: “We know that we can do better for our patients. We just want government to make that commitment and do what’s needed. To fund the service properly. Provide a contract dentists would choose to work under. Only then will we be able to retain, recruit and provide the care our patients need.”

0
0
0
s2sdefault

You need to be logged in to leave comments.

Please do not re-register if you have forgotten your details,
follow the links above to recover your password &/or username.
If you cannot access your email account, please contact us.

Mastodon Mastodon