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 help ensure that dental practices in West Sussex accept NHS-funded patients.

We provided an additional £50 million for National Health Service dentistry for the final quarter of 2021/22 to provide urgent care to patients. Of this funding, £6,887,000 was made available to the South East region, including West Sussex. NHS England and NHS Improvement have asked practices to deliver 100% of contracted units of dental activity and 100% of units of orthodontic activity to safely improve access for patients.

Dental patients are not registered to a particular practice outside a course of treatment. A dental practice can accept a patient for a course of treatment and there are no geographical restrictions on which practice a patient may attend. In addition, NHS Digital has written to practices to ensure that information on appointment availability via NHS.UK is updated to allow patients to access NHS dental care. Patients can contact NHS England’s Customer Contact Centre for assistance in finding a local dental practice or NHS 111 if seeking urgent dental care.

The Department and NHS England and NHS Improvement are working with stakeholders, including the British Dental Association, to improve NHS dentistry and negotiations are underway on initial measures. This aims to increase access to NHS dentistry, including in West Sussex.