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 increase the availability of NHS dental provision in Norfolk.

National Health Service dentists throughout the country have been asked to maximise safe throughput to meet as many prioritised needs as possible, focussing first on urgent care and care for vulnerable groups followed by overdue appointments. This has been underpinned 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.

NHS England and NHS Improvement are working with stakeholders to amend the Directory of Service to improve pathways for urgent patients to urgent dental centres and dental practices across the East of England. In addition, a web-based programme called ‘Service Finder’ has recently been launched which provides up-to-date information about services that are available locally. A transformational dental strategy has also been developed in the East of England, to prioritise urgent care, prevention and inequalities. Plans to procure additional primary care dental services across Suffolk, Norfolk and Waveney are currently being reviewed.