Sunak Quizzed About NHS Dental Access
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- Published: Tuesday, 09 August 2022 07:46
- Written by Guy Tuggle
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War in the Ukraine. The biggest rise in Bank Rate for 27 years. Festering conditions at ports and airports with the rail network grinding to a halt as unions strike for cost of living pay rises. Over six million people waiting for hospital treatment…
Conservative Party members who turned up to Sky News’s London studios to quiz leadership candidates Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak about their plans for office last week were certainly not short of material.
But whilst these topics were raised, it is indicative of the sorry state of NHS dentistry that one Conservative Councillor, Tom Murray, who represents St Olaves Ward of Bury St Edmunds, used his opportunity to quiz leadership hopeful and former Chancellor Rishi Sunak about the NHS dental access problem.
“I’m a town councillor for Bury St Edmunds and we lost our Kings Road NHS Dentist” said Cllr Murray. “They were brilliant. That was in 2018. Now some of us are going round talking like tube stations…’mind the gap…mind the gap’!
What can be done? It’s 2022! We need NHS dentistry, because frankly, a lot of us cannot afford to go private and we have fantastic private dentists in Bury S Edmunds but we need our NHS back. What can you do? How soon can you do it? That’s the problem - I’m running out of teeth!”
In an initially jovial response Sunak replied “I have seven fillings and that’s because I drank an enormous amount lot of Coke when I was a youngster, so I feel your pain and we do need good dentistry”.
Conceding that the ‘NHS was everyone’s number one public service priority’ Sunak’s reply did not specifically address dentistry, instead the politician defaulted to the stock platitudes about having grown up in an NHS household, being the son of a GP and a chemist mother which, he claimed, meant he understood well the role of primary care.
To make sure there is going to be more money for dentistry the former Chancellor said “we just have to be bolder about reforming the NHS to get more efficiency out of it.”
In order to shore up spending on health and social care Mr Sunak cited the controversial NI increase he had introduced which his opposite number has pledged to scrap.
The only ‘pledge’ Mr Sunak offered the NHS, and his comments mentioned GPs and hospitals but not dentists, was a commitment to confront the scandal of there being over 10M missed appointments each year which lengthens waiting lists.
Proposing a £10 fine for second appointments missed, Sunak said “we believe in an NHS that’s free at the point of use but it’s not free at point of misuse”.
Bury St Edmunds, in the heart of Suffolk, hit the news last year when the ‘Toothless in Suffolk’ movement was formed to raise awareness about the scarcity of NHS dentistry in the county and to campaign for change. The BDA’s Eddie Crouch marched in solidarity with the movement’s founders and the group has now expanded to form ‘Toothless in England’.
A check-up at Kings Road Dental Practice, mentioned by Cllr Murray in his question to Rishi Sunak costs £45 and a ‘new patient’ would pay £78 for an initial and comprehensive assessment.
Image Ccrdit https://www.flickr.com/photos/communitiesuk/25093325357 No Changes
One wonders if Mr S's restorations are nice composites?
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