Major NHS change will see everyone get a dentist within next four years
Everyone who needs an urgent NHS dental appointment will be able to get one within four years, the Government has said.
The minister with responsibility for dentistry has committed to reforming the flawed NHS dental contract by the end of this Parliament in a major win for the Mirror 's Dentists for All campaign. Health minister Stephen Kinnock gave the commitment when being grilled by MPs on the Health and Social Care Select Committee.
Currently most dental practices are not taking on new NHS patients and millions of people cannot get a dentist. Stressing the urgency for reform, Mr Kinnock, Minister for Care, said: 'We're on a burning platform."
"We have a moral imperative to fix NHS dentistry in our country. How can it be that we live in a country where the biggest cause of 5 to 9 year old children being taken to hospital is to have their decaying teeth removed? Tooth decay is an almost entirely preventable problem.'
READ MORE: Dentist: 'I feel guilty but I'm quitting the NHS to earn more going private'
The NHS dental contract has been branded 'perverse' by the British Dental Association as it disincentivises treating people who need care most - because dentists make a financial loss on high-needs patients.
Last week's Ten Year Health Plan sparked fears that proper reform of the dental contract will be kicked into the long grass until after the next General Election. It only said that by 2035 a new contract would be at the heart of a "transformed" NHS system.
Mr Kinnock said: 'We are absolutely clear that we have to fix this before the end of this Parliament. We want transformed NHS dentistry by 2035. But it is absolutely clear that the fundamental contract reform to put us on the pathway to change has to happen within this parliament.
'What does success look like by the end of this Parliament set for success? Everyone who needs access to urgent and unscheduled care must be able to access it and dentists must be incentivised and motivated to deliver NHS dentistry.'
The Government commitment comes in the week the Mirror has published a series of special reports from Devon which is one of Britain's worst dental deserts. We heard how the underfunded contract is driving an exodus of dentists into the private sector and children are left in pain waiting for multiple teeth to be removed.
READ MORE: Dentist being fined £150K by NHS for keeping patients' teeth too healthy
However Mr Kinnock suggested the Treasury is refusing to fund radical reform. Any new contract will likely recycle current "underspends" where dentists currently have to return cash due to the flawed system.
The total £3 billion budget for England is only enough to fund care for half the population. The committee heard that the budget for England has fallen from £3.6 billion in a decade and the British Dental Association said this equates to a funding cut of a third in real terms.
Minister Kinnock said: 'I think we've got to define what we want to do with the NHS contract, based on the reality of the finite resource that we will have. We have to work on the assumption that we will have the financial envelope in the region of the current financial settlement. That is the reality of the world that we live in. So the question then is how do we make that NHS contract work to its maximum impact for the people who need it most?
'I think we need to be very clear and robust about, with the finite resources we have, this is what we can achieve.'
Dr Shiv Pabary, BDA chair of the General Dental Committee, said: 'We've lost up to a third of our budget over the last ten years [in real terms]. Dentistry has had the most amount of money reduced as a proportion of the NHS budget. The spend in 2010 was 3.3% of the NHS budget now it's down to 1.5%.
'We've had huge cuts… we need to back any new system up with the necessary funding.'
A key demand of the Mirror's Dentists for All campaign is reform of the hated NHS payment contract which currently leaves practices treating high-needs NHS patients at a loss. It pays dentists the same if a patient needs three fillings as if a patient needs 20 fillings.
Dental contract reform was one of Labour's main manifesto promises before the 2024 General Election.
Mr Kinnock said Britain has the lowest ratio of dentists per capita of any country in the G7. He said: 'When we came into government a year ago, we inherited a system in terms of NHS dentistry that was on its knees.
'We are clear that we have to have a contract that ensures that everybody who has an urgent need for dental care gets it, that dentists are incentivised and motivated to do NHS work, and that every single penny that is allocated for NHS dentistry is spent on NHS dentistry.'
He added: 'When we say everybody who needs urgent care, gets it. It's about defining what we mean by 'need'.'
Interim measures announced on Tuesday will attempt to begin to change a situation where dentists are disincentivised from treating the patients who need care most.
It will require practices to provide a number of additional emergency appointments, on top of their regular patients, at an improved rate.
The NHS contract pays the practice for each Unit of Dental Activity - known as a UDA. A check-up is worth one UDA while a filling is worth three.
Dental practices are currently paid around £40 per UDA but for these extra emergency appointments practices will be paid £70 to £75.
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