Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to support dental services in (a) Coventry North East constituency, (b) Coventry, (c) the West Midlands and (d) England during the covid-19 outbreak.

Dental practices throughout England have been able to open for face to face dental care from 8 June 2020, including 32 general dental practices in Coventry. A personal protective equipment (PPE) portal is available to provide National Health Service dental and orthodontic providers with critical COVID-19 PPE free of charge.

NHS dentists throughout the country have been asked to maximise safe throughput to meet as many prioritised needs as possible. The revised unit of dental activity threshold has been set at 60% and the unit of orthodontic activity threshold has been set at 80% for full payment of the NHS contractual value, based on data that indicates the capacity practices are safely able to achieve.

As usual, where a practice under-delivers by up to 4%, they are able to carry this forward into the next financial year. Dental practices are also able to deliver less than 60% cumulative dental activity and 80% orthodontic activity with a reduced level of clawback. NHS 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.