Dental Services

(asked on 16th April 2021) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to improve (a) the recruitment and retention of NHS dentists and (b) access to those dentists in England.


Answered by
Jo Churchill Portrait
Jo Churchill
Minister of State (Department for Work and Pensions)
This question was answered on 28th April 2021

NHS England and NHS Improvement are responsible for commissioning primary care dentistry to meet local need and the interim NHS People Plan commits to addressing shortages.

We are working both on improving career pathways and the current dental contract. In the summer, Health Education England will publish the report of their ‘Advancing Dental Care’ programme which has explored opportunities for flexible dental training pathways and the Department will publish a report on the learning from dental contract reform programme. NHS England and NHS Improvement have been asked to lead the next stage of dental contract reform to design implementable proposals taking the learning from reform programme into account.

National Health Service dentists have been asked to maximise safe throughput, focussing first on urgent care and vulnerable groups followed by overdue appointments. This has been underpinned, taking into account current infection prevention and control guidelines, by the requirement for dental providers to deliver 60% of normal activity volumes for the first six months of 2021/22 for full payment of the NHS contractual value.

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