Oral Evidence To Commons Committee Pulls No Punches – Part Four
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- Published: Tuesday, 11 April 2023 07:43
- Written by Guy Tuggle
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In his fourth and final dip into the oral evidence presented to the Health & Social Care Committee’s Inquiry into NHS Dental Access, GDPUK’s Guy Tuggle reviews the final deliberations of Ian Brack, the Chief Executive and Registrar of the General Dental Council; Dr Abhi Pal, President of the College of General Dentistry; and Malcolm Smith, Chair of HEE’s Advancing Dental Care Review and Dental Education Reform Programme.
Paul Blomfield MP (LAB, Sheffield Central) drilled down on “what could a future dental workforce look like, which concentrates much more on prevention and looking at oral health in a wider sense?
Malcolm Smith responded. “we are looking at the more specialised end of dentistry. I use that term broadly rather than as “a specialist”. Obviously, we need the highly qualified dentist to be delivering at that level. That is part of the process, but there is a lot of stuff in between.
We have talked about oral health and how we can integrate it fairly easily in the system. It is how we look at that and how we deliver those services so that we take full advantage of the skills of the whole workforce - that is the key.”
But who’s doing what? Dental Workforce Figures Are Vague
Paul Blomfield replied “I am trying to get a sense of how we might rebalance the workforce so that there are different skillsets that might provide for a different approach to dental care. Malcolm Smith came back “We need to create the opportunities and have an understanding. I have been asking for a dental workforce survey for the last six or seven years. So far, we do not have one, so I do not actually know what our current workforce are doing.
I do not know what their intentions are. We have some good figures about how many, which do not sound too bad, but we do not know whether they are working full time or one day a week, or in the health service or not. We need more data to deliver that sort of modelling. Then, if we look forward, we need to look at what the service requires and marry the two.”
Smith continued “We need to know what workforce we have available to us; we need to know what workforce we need to deliver the service that the NHS wants; and there needs to be a bit of intelligent thinking between the two things, in my view, to marry them up. If we ever get that right, we might well be in a good place, but I am still waiting for the dental workforce survey. Nobody wants to commission it.
Ian Brack of the GDC agreed. “I can tell you that at the end of 2021 there were 43,292 dentists. There were 59,399 dental nurses. There were 4,378 therapists. I do not know if that is actually what the UK needs. I just know that that is what there were. I do not know where they work. I do not know what they are doing. I do not know how many hours they work. That is all I know.”
Dr Pal said “We speak to a lot of early career dentists, who are in the first three or four years from qualifying. Invariably, they say a number of things. One is that they are a little bit lost as to which direction they should go. They see less future in the health service.
We have talked about all the reasons. They feel that they cannot work in the best way that their training would allow them to work.
The committee and its witnesses indulged in some debate about number being trained and then returned to numbers in the workforce. Mr Johnson stated “We do not know whether or not we have enough dentists because we do not have the whole-time equivalents. We may or may not.
“What we know we do not have is enough dentists working in the health service. That is critical”
The Chair thanked everyone and started the inquiry had generated much interest and would continue. GDPUK has made contact and it was suggested that there would be an additional session or sessions to hear and collate more evidence. We will also take a reflective look at the written submissions.
This is not the first time Parliament has examined NHS dentistry. It is to be hoped that this inquiry will do more than cement the often held belief that ‘Parliament is nothing more than a talking shop’.
For the sake of the tens of thousands of children with cavities, the teenagers with crooked teeth, the adults with real pain in their teeth and gums and the elderly in desperate need of dentures and dignity, our MPs owe it to the public and the dental clinicians to sort this wretched crisis once and for all.
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