Pharmacists and GP’s View Dental Style Departure from NHS
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- Published: Tuesday, 02 December 2025 08:30
- Written by Peter Ingle
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Amongst the various professions delivering healthcare, dentists and in particular GDPs, have been heading to the NHS exit door in large numbers. Unsurprisingly this has left NHS dental provision near breaking point.
Successive UK health ministers have arrived, loudly vowed to ‘fix’ NHS dentistry, and eventually moved on leaving the same problems for their successors to grapple with. Meanwhile, dentists have quietly got on with their careers and practices, as they steadily reduced their NHS commitment.
Now the deputy chair of the BMA’s GP committee in England has warned that the Government’s stance towards general practice could force their profession to follow the dental model. Dr David Wrigley, speaking at a conference organised by Keep Our NHS Public, said GPs must now campaign against this happening.
A recent story in Pulse broke the news that the Government is threatening to change the way it negotiates with GPs. Contract negotiations with the BMA’s GP committee will change to a system where the committee is consulted alongside wider stakeholders, likely to include patient groups, and the Royal College of General Practitioners.
Dr Wrigley said: ‘NHS general practice is on a knife edge. Decades of underfunding and a government now attacking the doctor’s trade union puts us in a critical situation. It’s entirely possible you will see your local GP becoming more like the dentistry model with good access and care only for those with enough cash to pay for it. We have to campaign to stop this happening.’
Dr Wrigley had already accused the Government of trying to ‘sideline’ the BMA as a trade union, with its changes to the contract negotiation process.
Meanwhile, GPC England, the GPs representative body, have demanded an urgent discussion with the Government to ‘reset’ their relationship. Emergency motions were debated at a recent meeting, with one expressing ‘deep concern at the level of animosity’ between the Government and the committee.
A second motion concluded there was ‘no immediate prospect of a productive relationship with this Government’, nor of fulfilment of their ‘promise of a new GMS contract.’
The Government and NHS England have recently cancelled all meetings with the GPC, a breakdown in their relationship which follows their dispute over online access changes.
There are those at the Department of Health hoping that they will be rescued in part by compliant pharmacists filling some of the gaps left in GP service provision. For them, an eight part series running in Pharmacy Business will not have made pleasant reading.
In the series, Christchurch Health Centre director and healthcare entrepreneur Baba Akomolafe explains what community pharmacies can learn from UK dentistry.
He writes of dentistry’s response to what he describes as the crisis of 2006. A key message is that they stopped waiting for the NHS contract to change, and instead changed themselves.
As Mr Akomolafe puts it: “When dentists realised the NHS contract wasn’t going to evolve in line with modern practice, they faced a stark truth: waiting was wasting time. Every year of frozen fees and rising costs pushed them further away from sustainability.”
He describes the dentist’s “mindset shift” that changed everything, “If the system won’t value us, we must value ourselves.”
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