Coronavirus: Dental Services

(asked on 18th March 2020) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what guidance his Department has provided to dentists on preventing infection during the covid-19 outbreak.


Answered by
Jo Churchill Portrait
Jo Churchill
Minister of State (Department for Work and Pensions)
This question was answered on 3rd June 2020

The Government is working to support and protect all our frontline National Health Service health and care staff during the COVID-19 pandemic, including dentists. NHS England issued a series of guidance to ensure dental teams safety and their role in supporting the wider NHS and social care system during the pandemic.

NHS dentistry was reorganised in late March along with other NHS primary care services to minimise face to face care to contain the spread of COVID-19 during the peak of the pandemic. Dentists were asked to suspend all routine treatment and instead to offer urgent advice and, where required, prescriptions for antibiotics by telephone. Urgent treatment was made available through urgent dental centres (UDCs) set up in each NHS region.

As of 25 May there are currently over 550 UDCs open across England. Patients are triaged into UDCs by their own dentistry or through NHS 111. The urgent dental centres are expected to provide, where urgently needed, the full range of dental treatment normally available on the NHS.

NHS England and NHS Improvement announced on 28 May that NHS dentistry outside urgent care centres will begin to restart from 8 June with the aim of increasing levels of service as fast as is compatible with maximising safety. A copy of the letter that was published can be found on the NHS England website.

The latest COVID-19 guidance for dental practices can be found at the following link:

https://www.england.nhs.uk/coronavirus/primary-care/dental-practice

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