The official plan to increase access to NHS dental services in England has been a “complete failure”, and some of the government’s initiatives have worsened the crisis, a damning report warns.
Millions of patients continue to be denied dental care, forcing them to pay for private treatment, build up mountains of credit card debt, or even worse perform dangerous DIY dentistry on their own teeth, the research by MPs found.
Without immediate and significant changes to fix the “broken” system, there would be no future for population-wide access to NHS dentistry, the report by the public accounts committee (PAC) said.
“This country is now years deep in an avalanche of harrowing stories of the impact of dentistry’s system failure,” said Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, the chair of the committee. “It is utterly disgraceful that, in the 21st century, some Britons have been forced to remove their own teeth.”
He added: “Last year’s dental recovery plan was supposed to address these problems, something our report has found it has signally failed to do. Almost unbelievably, the government’s initiatives appear to have actually resulted in worsening the picture, with fewer new patients seen since the plan’s introduction.”
The blueprint to save NHS dentistry was launched by the Conservative government in February 2024, with a promise that it would fund more than 1.5m additional NHS treatments or 2.5m appointments.
This included a new patient premium (NPP), with dental practices receiving credits for each eligible new patient they saw, a “golden hello” recruitment scheme that introduced £20,000 incentive payments for dentists, and mobile dental vans targeting communities.
But the committee found the NPP, which has cost at least £88m since it was introduced last March, had resulted in the crisis getting worse, with 3% fewer new patients seeing an NHS dentist.
The “golden hello” scheme had appointed fewer than 20% of the expected 240 dentists by February 2025, the PAC report added, and mobile dental vans had been dropped altogether.
MPs said current funding and contractual arrangements would only cover about half of England’s population to see an NHS dentist over a two-year period “at best”.
They found that just 40% of adults saw an NHS dentist in the two years to March 2024, compared with 49% in the two years before the Covid-19 pandemic.
They also highlighted the “discrepancy” between what a dentist could earn doing NHS work and private work, which their report described as a “fundamental issue for improving access”.
According to the report, there were 34,520 dentists registered to provide services in England in April 2023, with 24,193 offering some NHS care in 2023-24. But the PAC said that without proper remuneration, more dentists would move exclusively to the private sector.
Thea Stein, the chief executive of the Nuffield Trust, a health thinktank, said: “We warned more than a year ago that NHS dentistry in England had fallen apart as a universal service, and small tweaks could not bring it back.
“This report today from the PAC confirms the worst, with little to show or even steps backwards.”
Shiv Pabary, the chair of the British Dental Association’s general dental practice committee, said: “MPs have arrived at an inescapable conclusion, that tweaks at the margins have not and will not save NHS dentistry.”
The Department of Health and Social Care said the Labour government had “inherited a broken NHS dental sector” and was working to fix it with a new plan.
Source: theguardian.com
