Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, how many and what proportion of practising dentists in each county in the East of England are taking on new NHS patients.
The information requested is not collected centrally. The NHS Choices website, www.nhs.uk, publishes some dental practice-level information about whether National Health Service patients in various categories are being accepted for new courses of treatment. However, the relevant data collection is voluntary and not all dental practices have taken the opportunity to return this information to NHS Choices.