NHS Website is “a work of fiction” According to BBC
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- Published: Friday, 14 November 2025 09:55
- Written by Peter Ingle
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The BBC seems to be on a roll when it comes to giving a wider airing to dental stories that the profession are familiar with, but which are unknown to the general public. This is despite the BBC‘s own major problems with fictional news.
First came a report exposing the scale of illegal tooth whitening flourishing in plain sight of the GDC. Now BBC North East has looked into the NHS Find a Dentist website.
A total of 34 North East of England practices on the website were shown as “accepting new NHS patients when availability allows.” When contacted, only three were in a position to offer appointments, and all located in Newcastle.
None of the 24 dentists in the Northumberland, Gateshead, North Tyneside, South Tyneside, Sunderland, Durham or Stockton areas were taking on new patients, with one having a waiting list of four years. In the Darlington and Middlesbrough areas no dentists were accepting new adult NHS patients.
When asked to comment, the BDA said that adding, "when availability allows," was an attempt to conceal the scale of the access crisis and had also confused patients.
Commenting on the BBC’s findings, BDA chair Eddie Crouch said: "The data on (the website) is a work of fiction. He added that: "The last government dropped straightforward yes/no questions on whether practices can take new patients, to try and cover the scale of the access crisis. A new government won’t fix this just by playing around with words on a website."
In response to the BBC’s enquiry, NHS England (NHSE) did not explain why the wording was changed or why so few dentists actually had availability, but said it provided practices with “tools and support” to routinely update whether they were accepting new patients. This presumably referred to the frequent communications from NHSE reminding practices to keep their entries up to date.
The Association of Dental Groups (ADG), which represents both NHS and private dental services, said there were not enough NHS dentists around to "meet demands". Executive chair Neil Carmichael was unsurprised that patients trying to access an NHS dentist by contacting a practice were being met with a "sorry, no availability message". Indeed, he had his own explanation for this: "NHSE may be either slow or reluctant to update their website with these depressing facts, and it is our ADG members who own the dental practices that are having to deliver the bad news to patients.”
The BBC gave the case of one former NHS patient, who in the reports words had been removed from a practice’s “NHS list” and invited to reapply on a private plan.
"It feels like betrayal because we pay our taxes into the NHS and then you suddenly can’t get treatment on it," they said.
When contacted the practice had commented: "It was either that we close our doors and deliver no service to the community or we change the way we work."
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