Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether his department has considered replacing the routine six-monthly dental check-up with a system based on individual clinical need.

Patients should be recalled based on their clinical need. The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) guidance on recall intervals states that a healthy adult with good oral health should see a dentist once every two years, and a child once every year.

On 16 December we published the Government’s response to the public consultation on improvements to the National Health Service dental contract. The changes will be introduced from April 2026. These reforms will put patients with greatest need first, incentivising urgent care and complex treatments, and will reduce clinically unnecessary check-ups.

Through the consultation, we sought feedback on alternative approaches or strategies that could best support practices to adhere to evidence-based recommendations on the time between routine examinations. The Government will consider further how best to implement the preferred options to support clinically appropriate check-ups that are also aligned to NICE guidance, noting that public education and the introduction of a risk assessment tool were the most popular options respondents to the consultation selected. The Government also intends to introduce ‘clinically appropriate patient recalls’ as the first topic of the quality improvement initiative, which was also proposed through the recent consultation. Further information is available from the following link:

https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/nhs-dentistry-contract-quality-and-payment-reforms/outcome/government-response-to-consultation-on-nhs-dentistry-contract-quality-and-payment-reforms