Bad News For Access As Dental Deserts Expand
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- Published: Friday, 07 October 2022 07:40
- Written by Peter Ingle
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Improving access to NHS dentistry was to be one of Liz Truss’ priorities for her first 90 days in office. Memorably, the Secretary of State, Thérèse Coffey name checked dentistry as one of her ABCD priorities.
In less than a month we have had the loss of our longest serving Monarch, a new Prime Minister, the first State funeral in over 50 years, an economy and currency that appeared to be on the brink of collapse and fresh threats of nuclear war. Despite this dentistry, or the lack of it, has manged to hit the news once again.
The source of the latest story though is new, coming from the Local Government Association (LGA) which represents 350 councils in England and Wales. The organisation describes itself as the voice of local government, and works with councils to support and promote local government. It is not itself politically aligned and contains groups for the three largest parties in England and Wales, as well as an independent and smaller party group.
The LGA has analysed data from the CQC to shed light on the regional variations in dental access. Its headline conclusion is that there are growing “dental deserts.” The LGA calculated the number of dentists ‘providing NHS treatment’ per 1000 population.
Conclusions were that rural and deprived areas were more likely to have shortages of NHS dentists, most of the areas with the worst shortages having higher than average levels of deprivation or rural residents. The City of Westminster has the greatest number of dentists per 1000 population, with six times as many as Ashfield, the area with the lowest number.
The LGA quoted Public Health England’s research showing huge disparities in child dental health. Across English local authorities, decay experience ranges from 7 to 51% of five year olds. In general, it was the children in more affluent communities who had better dental health.
Councils receive public health grants that are used to run programmes to promote good oral health, this has dropped by 24% in real terms since 2015/6. Commenting, Cllr David Fothergill, Chairman of the LGA’s Community Wellbeing Board said that, “The Government should reform the contract it has with dental surgeries as well as develop a workforce strategy to ensure we can have affordable dental treatments for communities across the country.”
For the BDA, Chair Eddie Crouch said, “To save this service we need real commitment - root and branch reform and adequate funding. A broken contract is forcing dentists out of the NHS every day it remains in force. Tinkering at the margins will do nothing to help the patients who need us most.”
The GLA survey, while unlikely to surprise GDPUK readers was taken up by national newspapers, once again drumming home the message to the public that NHS dentistry is often unavailable. At the time of her victory in the leadership election there were no practices in the Prime Ministers own constituency that were taking on new NHS adult patients.
In Westminster in the most recent period recorded there was one dentist per 1200 population. In Mid Suffolk, near both the PM and Health Secretary’s seats, there is one dentist for 14900 people.
In recent days, news from Bristol stated not a single NHS dentist was taking on new patients.
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