East of England NHS dental patients are due to receive access to nearly 70,000 additional urgent dental appointments.

 

In a push to end the trend of DIY dentistry, Health Minister Stephen Kinnock instructed regional health bosses to deliver this excess number of dental care appointments.

 

 

Stephen Kinnock stated:

“We promised we would end the misery faced by hundreds of thousands of people unable to get urgent dental care. Today we’re delivering on that commitment.”

 

Regarding NHS dental care in the East as a “lottery”, government figures demonstrated that a as many as one in four patients had not been able to see a dentist in the past two years.

Toothless in English campaign group, was happy to hear the news but also had reservations regarding it.

 

Proposed areas

• Norfolk and Waveney Integrated Care Board (ICB) – 21,000 proposed appointments
• Suffolk and North East Essex ICB – 15,000 proposed appointments
• Cambridgeshire and Peterborough ICB – 14,000 proposed appointments
• Bedfordshire, Luton and Milton Keynes – 6,000 (with similar figures for Mid and South Essex and Hertfordshire and West Essex.)

Additionally, a separate pilot has already been operating in Suffolk and North East Essex, to help those with on-the-day needs to find a practice.

 

Over the last ten months, The Dental Priority Access and Stabilisation Service (DPASS) has held over 9,500 appointments spanning 19 practices. It says that A&E attendance for dental issues have lessened as a result.

The DPASS was formed as a collaboration between the Suffolk and North East Essex ICB, the Practice Plus Group and dental practices.

According to Belinda White, Practice Plus Group’s regional manager, the 111 service in the area can receive up to 3,000 telephone calls per month regarding dental pain. Due to the low number of practices with availability for NHS patients, call handlers had a limited number of options for referrals.

 

Ms. White said:

“We have had patients who have rung us threatening self-harm and suicide, because of the pain they’re in.

“That is a terrible position for the patient and it’s distressing for our staff team.

“Since we’ve come into place there’s a massive change in the options we have for patients who have got an urgent dental requirement. Bringing together these partners and putting the patient in the middle… it’s a really beautiful thing.”

The urgent care pilot has treated patients with more extreme issues, such as broken crowns, tooth loss abscesses and gum disease.

 

Clinical lead for dentistry for the Suffolk and North East Essex ICB, Nicholas Barker, said:

“About 90% attend with fairly urgent tooth pain, it’s probably one of the worst pains for humankind.

“Because of Covid and lesser access to dental care, then disease (is) built over a while.

“Services such as DPASS are getting us to a situation where we’re back to status quo……The tap is turning on and we’re able to get people through.”

 

Prof. Barker also stated that Ten months into the 18-month pilot, fewer people were presenting themselves to A&E, though much more needed to be done on preventing things escalating to that stage.

He said that DPASS appointments may also give patients access to the “whole dental team”, such as hygienists and dental therapists who may be able to stabilise patient issues and stop it escalating to crisis level.

 

Alice Macdonald, Labour MP for Norwich North said:

“People have been struggling for too long to get basic dental care and this announcement will go some way to alleviating the issues for those awaiting urgent care.”

 

Co-founder of Toothless in England, Mark Jones, said:

“It will make a huge difference for those lucky enough to still have an NHS practice in their town or local to them… but there are so few practices offering NHS dental services in Suffolk and beyond,” he said.

“There’s only so many emergency appointments a practice can do in one day. We’ll have to see how sustainable that is.”

 

The Minister of State for Care said:

“NHS dentistry has been left broken after years of neglect, with patients left in pain without appointments, or queueing around the block just to be seen.

“Thanks to this intervention, patients across the East of England will benefit from thousands more emergency appointments.

“Through our Plan for Change, this government will rebuild dentistry – focusing on prevention, retention of NHS dentists and reforming the NHS contract to make NHS work more appealing to dentists and increase capacity for more patients.

This will take time, but today marks an important step towards getting NHS dentistry back on its feet.”

 

My two-penneth

This all sounds really promising, but I agree with the co-founder of Toothless in England’s stance on being being glad of the news, albeit with reservations.

We have a national crisis regarding dental health care as this blog pretty much exists to cover at this point – but all of a sudden we are to expect a very large number of additional appointments solely in the the East of England for urgent NHS appointments?

This sounds a little bit too good to be true to me, but I suppose that the proof will be in the statistics further down the line. I genuinely hope that this target is met, or even better – exceeded, when all is said and done. 

Nobody should have to wait to have routine dental care in this day and age, let alone struggle to get urgent treatment.