Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what additional support he has allocated to the dental sector to increase capacity for (a) routine patient appointments and (b) urgent care during the covid-19 outbreak.

During the pandemic over 600 urgent treatment centres have been opened to support the delivery of urgent care. National Health Service dentists have been asked to maximise safe throughput to meet as many prioritised needs as possible, focussing first on urgent care and vulnerable groups, followed by overdue routine care. This has been underpinned by the requirement for dental providers to deliver 60% of contracted units of dental activity and 80% of units of orthodontic activity for the first six months of 2021/22 in order to receive full payment of their NHS contract value.

Guidance has also been issued by NHS England on the use of flexible commissioning to target restricted dental capacity to those patient groups that most need support.