Dental Services: Coronavirus

(asked on 11th March 2021) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether dentists will be able to return to normal working practices in (a) Step 3 or (b) Step 4 of the national covid-19 roadmap.


Answered by
Jo Churchill Portrait
Jo Churchill
Minister of State (Department for Work and Pensions)
This question was answered on 8th April 2021

We are working with NHS England and NHS Improvement to increase levels of dental activity as fast as is safely possible. Contractual arrangements for the first six months of the 2021/22 financial year have been introduced by NHS England and NHS Improvement. The revised unit of dental activity threshold set at 60% is based on data that indicates practices may now have capacity to safely achieve more dental activity. Arrangements will be monitored on a monthly basis and are expected to be in place for six months in order to provide increased stability for dental practices. National Health Service commissioners have the discretion to make exceptions, for instance in cases where a dental practice has been impacted by staff being required to self-isolate.

We are working to address oral health inequalities. NHS England and NHS Improvement have provided local commissioners with a flexible commissioning toolkit to illustrate how best to use current flexibilities in commissioning to target capacity on improving access to urgent care and delivering care to high risk patient groups.

Reticulating Splines