The Health Secretary has announced the Government's plan to make dental services faster, simpler and fairer.
It aims to improve dental services by making them:
Faster for patients through our new patient premium to support dentists to take on new patients and a new marketing campaign to help everyone who needs one to find a dentist
Simpler for patients and for dental staff by streamlining and tackling bureaucracy, with a wider set of workforce reforms to maximise the skills across the entire dental clinical team
Fairer, particularly for our rural and coastal communities, by introducing mobile dental care to the most isolated communities, offering āgolden helloā incentives to encourage dentists into under-served areas and supporting those practices with the lowest rates of payment for their work
The full announcement can be read, here: www.gov.uk/government/publications/our-plan-to-recover-and-reform-nhs-dentistry/faster-simpler-and-fairer-our-plan-to-recover-and-reform-nhs-dentistry
Local Dentists Welcome the Plans:
In West Sussex, in Worthing and Arun, we want the same situation found in parts of London, where dentists have a sign saying, āNew NHS patients welcomeā.
In particular, following close work with campaign groups and local dentists, I welcome the major increase in NHS contract payments.
This is a longstanding issue created by contract changes under Tony Blair and Labour in 2006, worsened and brought to public attention during the Covid-19 Pandemic. This is the primary concern raised by local dentists when I have previously written to them.
The proposed increase of dental training places by up to 40% and additional support for students will go far in bringing more graduate dentists into the NHS.
We share in welcoming the projected million more NHS dental appointments over the next year thanks to the recovery plan.
Enabling our local dentists to do the good work that they want to do should be our primary focus.
Recognising the Steps Forward:
While making the announcement, the Health Secretary recognised my hard work on this important campaign.
In response to the announcement, I asked for assurance that the Government will continue to work closely with the British Dental Association and General Dental Council to take the limits off of contracting so that dentists, especially younger ones, can do as much work as they can and can help as many patients as possible.
Constituents will have confidence that my hard work in support of increased NHS Dental provision will continue. Campaign groups will know that they can rely on me to echo their concerns and priorities and to push for the necessary further steps to enable us to get back to the situation that we were in before Labour changed the rules about 20 years ago.
We are united in welcoming these positive steps forward.
We share in understanding the issues and we work together to achieve positive results.ā Progress comes with the right approach.
