Dentist Industry and NHS Backlogs — House of Commons, 2022-02-07
Topic: Health
Andrew John Carter (Conservative, Centre-right): My hon. Friend is absolutely right: many of the dentists I have spoken to say that working with these activity targets is like being on a treadmill. It wrongly puts the focus on meeting targets, rather than delivering the sort of patient care we need to be delivered in our dentists’ surgeries On the back of receiving news from constituents who contacted me that a surgery in Appleton was to close, I went to see Dr Mansour Mirza, who runs Appleton Park dental surgery. He talked me through his decision to give notice to the NHS. He was handing back a contract worth hundreds of thousands of pounds which his practice had had for many years. I want to thank Dr Mirza for being so open and so frank with me about the decision that he had to take earlier this year. Providing the treatment that he is required to deliver under the contract just does not add up. It costs him more to provide the services than he is paid. No one can survive over the long term if that is the case, so it is hardly surprising that his contract, like many others around the United Kingdom, is being handed back to the NHS I am also grateful to David Flattery, a dentist who lives in Lymm and owns and manages a practice in Altrincham, for his insights. He says that the incentives to take on new NHS patients at his practice are slim to none, owing to the workload and the quotas that he has to meet under the "units of dental activity" system. When he explained how the system works, with units attributed to particular types of treatment, I came away scratching my head. Dentists are effectively paid the same for delivering a check-up as they are for root canal work, although one of those procedures involves a tremendous amount more work than the other. That makes little sense The Minister will know that UDAs simply do not work, and it is time to replace the contract with a more modern system which reflects dentistry in the 21st century. Dr Miraz told me that his private work had been subsidising the NHS contract for many years, and that despite wanting to continue, he simply could not afford to provide the NHS services that he had signed up to. Shockingly, the regional NHS team did not seem to want to find a solution: they have simply left people without access to any NHS dentist There is a real fear that NHS dentistry will disappear in the months and years to come. Dentists want to do the job of dentistry. It seems from what I have heard about the experience of dentists working through the pandemic that the likelihood of having payment clawed back by the NHS has grown. In the current quarter, dentists need to deliver 80% of their contracted UDAs, at a time when the prevalence of covid and the omicron variant is at its highest point in the entire pandemic, but the targets that have been set for dentists have risen during that period. If patients cancel or staff are sick and dentists cannot deliver that 80% of UDAs, the dentists lose funding, which means that they cannot pay the salaries of their staff, meet the rent, or provide future services for children or those with the lowest earnings. I believe that dentists are conscientious and caring healthcare professionals. They want to treat their patients, but they also want to be treated fairly by the NHS. Mr Flattery told me: "If we really want to incentivise prevention, we need to see change urgently. ‘Incentives’ to just drill and fill is what the industry has been arguing against for many years." The latest NHS dental statistics show that in NHS Warrington clinical commissioning group, only 33.6% of child patients were seen by a dentist in the 12 months to June 2021, a fall from 54% patients the year before.