The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Dame Andrea Leadsom)
On 7 February 2024 the Government published our report, “Faster, simpler and fairer: our plan to recover and reform NHS dentistry”, to accelerate the recovery of NHS dentistry from the covid-19 pandemic. The plan will fund up to 2.5 million additional appointments, or more than 1.5 million additional courses of dental treatment and is already delivering, with over 500 more dental practices showing themselves as open to new patients as of 9 May. Our commitment is to improve access to NHS dental care so that those who need to see a dentist are able to, especially in under-served parts of the country.
A key priority for this Government is to grow capacity within dentistry so that there are more NHS dentists delivering care to patients. The NHS long-term workforce plan sets an ambition to increase dentistry places by 40%. This is the biggest numerical expansion of NHS training places in the history of the NHS and will mean that by 2031 we are training 1,100 dentists each year.
However, training more dentists is not the sole solution to current workforce challenges in NHS dentistry. We need dentists to do more NHS work alongside, or instead of, their private work.
More than 35,000 dentists are registered with the General Dental Council in England. However, only 24,151 dentists delivered at least some NHS activity in England in 2022 to 2023. This means that nearly one third of registered dentists are not contributing to NHS dentistry and may be exclusively working in private practice. Furthermore, data published today by the NHS Business Services Authority shows that of those that are delivering NHS dental activity, some dentists are making only a token commitment to NHS dentistry.
The Government estimate that training an individual dentist from the beginning of dental school through to graduation can cost up to approximately £292,000, of which costs in the region of £200,000 are not repayable by the student. We believe it is right and fair to seek better value for the significant investment that the taxpayer makes in the education and training of the dental workforce, and for graduate dentists to invest their skills and expertise in the NHS for the benefit of patients. This NHS experience will be of great benefit to them throughout their practice, as well as enabling better access for patients.
That is why we are today publishing a consultation on introducing a “tie-in” for graduate dentists. The introduction of a minimum NHS service requirement, or “tie-in”, would aim to ensure that newly qualified dentists spend at least some of their time delivering NHS dental care in the years following the completion of training. This may include working in a “high street” primary care dental practice, secondary care, community dentistry or dental public health.
The consultation will seek views on two main principles:
Newly qualified dentists should commit to delivering at least a minimum amount of NHS dental care, for a minimum number of years after graduating.
Newly qualified dentists should repay some of the public funding invested in their education and training if they do not deliver a minimum amount of NHS dental care.
The morale and wellbeing of our highly skilled and hard-working dental workforce is of utmost priority. I want to thank the many hard-working dentists for all their efforts as we have seen real improvements over the past year. We want to make NHS work more attractive to ensure NHS dentists are incentivised to deliver NHS care. As part of this, we have already announced a package of reforms to improve patient access and provide fairer remuneration for dentists. We are also supporting our excellent dental staff to work at the top of their training, and encouraging more hard-working dentists to those areas of England that are currently under-served. This is accompanied by detailed policy work on further reforms to the 2006 dental contract, in discussion with the profession, to properly reflect the care needed by different patients and more fairly remunerate practices. We want the outcome of this work to be better for patients and better for the workforce.
The publication of this consultation marks an important step in the delivery of both our plan to recover and reform NHS dentistry and the NHS long term workforce plan. We aim to make dental services faster, simpler and fairer for patients and the dedicated dentistry workforce. I would encourage all those with an interest in the policy proposal, whether professionals, organisations or members of the public, to share their views and to shape our approach.
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