NHS: Health and Social Care Act 2012

Lord Colwyn Excerpts

Thursday 8th September 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Colwyn (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a retired dental surgeon and a fellow of the British Dental Association. I thank the noble Viscount, Lord Hanworth, for securing this debate. Although I shall need to read his speech in Hansard to make full sense of it, he gives me time to make a brief intervention to remind noble Lords of the importance to the long-term sustainability of the NHS of improving the nation’s oral health and ensuring good dental care.

We were reminded of this very starkly earlier this week when the front page of the Times and other newspapers reported the results of the research carried out by the British Dental Association, showing that 600,000 people a year seek help with toothache from their doctors—their general medical practitioners—who are neither qualified nor set up to deal with dental issues. This puts unnecessary pressure on the system, costing the NHS at least £26 million a year and wasting GPs’ time, resulting in longer waits for people whom they can really help.

People are seeking a free GP appointment instead of going to see a dentist because of the chronic underfunding of NHS dentistry and constantly increasing dental patient charges. The fees for NHS dental treatment continue to rise much faster than inflation and people’s earnings, having gone up by 5% this year and increasing by a further 5% next year. I have been arguing that this unprecedented increase will discourage patients who most need to see the dentist from going to see one, but this latest research clearly shows that it also puts an avoidable burden on the rest of the already-strained NHS.

While NHS care is supposed to be free at the point of use, this latest increase means patients now cover 26% of their NHS dentistry costs—up by more than a third compared with a decade ago. If this trend continues it will take just 15 years before patients pay for most of their treatment. This is set against the backdrop of £170 million of NHS dentistry funding having been cut by the Government since 2010, with patient charges increasingly used to make up the shortfall.

Neglecting oral health puts pressure on not only our general practitioners but our hospitals. The number of people going to A&E with emergency dental problems has been rising sharply and tens of thousands of people continue to be admitted for scheduled tooth extractions. It is frankly a scandal that tooth extractions under general anaesthesia remain the number one reason for hospital admissions in young children, with 160 youngsters and their parents going through this painful and stressful procedure, which is not without its risks, every day. The cost of these completely preventable treatments has gone up by more than 60% in the past four years and now stands at £35 million a year. Again, it is the kind of avoidable pressure our struggling hospitals could really do without. We simply cannot continue to treat oral health as separate and inferior to other areas of health, neglecting prevention and reducing NHS dentistry funding while topping it up with inflated patient charges. It is not only bad for people’s dental and general health; it is also a false economy that puts unnecessary strain on our GPs and hospitals. It is an important part of our health service which we must not overlook when discussing the long-term sustainability of the NHS.