Access to NHS Dentistry

Virendra Sharma Excerpts

Thursday 10th February 2022 Westminster Hall

[Mr Virendra Sharma (Ealing, Southall) (Lab)]

It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Efford, and I congratulate the hon. Member for Waveney (Peter Aldous) on securing the debate.

We urgently need to find a long-term, sustainable solution to the crisis that NHS dentistry faces. Covid has been tough on it, but the trouble did not start in March 2020. Parveen Kapoor, a dentist working in my constituency, is at his wits’ end. His surgery is inundated with patients, many of whom have not been able to see a dentist for years. In his words:

“Covid made a bad situation even worse.”

Parveen is so proud of the work that he and his colleagues do. He cares so deeply about his patients. However, as he says,

“we are a caring profession, but the crisis is making offering our patients the care we need difficult, and it won’t take much more to make it impossible.”

A long-term solution starts with making NHS dentistry a place where people want to work. We also need to see a reshaping of NHS dentistry that ensures that patients can access surgeries and that prevention is effectively prioritised.

Over the past decade, both staff and patients have suffered the consequences of chronic underfunding. NHS dentistry has suffered unprecedented cuts not seen elsewhere in the NHS, with net Government spending on general dental practice in England cut by about a third in the past decade. This crisis is a result of Government choices.

Contracts are failing while staff suffer burnout, and dental practices struggle to navigate recruitment and staff retention. The British Dental Association’s general dental practice committee chairman has described NHS dentistry as “hanging by a thread”. Close to 1,000 dentists left the NHS in England alone in the last financial year. Morale is at an all-time low, as dentists turn to private practice, opt for early retirement and seek career changes.

As a result, communities across the UK face alarming access problems. Pre-pandemic, Healthwatch England concluded that 85% of dental practices were closed to new adult patients. The situation was exacerbated by the pandemic; a full year’s worth of appointments were lost between April 2020 and December 2021. Dentists still see only a fraction of the number of patients they usually see due to social distancing measures and underfunded efforts to improve ventilation. This has lasting consequences for our communities.

Good oral health is essential to general health and wellbeing. Oral health inequality is widening, while patients turn to dangerous DIY dentistry. Despite ongoing restrictions related to the pandemic, NHS dentistry in England continues to suffer the consequences of harsh funding cuts. Surgeries in England have been set extreme targets, or have to pay back funding; they are overstretched and struggling. Dentistry should be treated not simply as an afterthought but as a central pillar in upcoming reforms of the healthcare system. We need sustainable, long-term action focused on prevention before it is too late.

A sector that is key for health has borne the brunt of austerity cuts. One-off investments, such as the Government’s £50 million so-called dentistry treatment blitz last month, are not enough. The treatment blitz barely made a dent in unprecedented backlogs and runs the risk of further overwhelming pressurised practices and staff. This Government, in office for 11 years, have created this crisis in dentistry. I hope the Minister will take steps to resolve it.