Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to tackle the backlog of hospital dental departments due to the postponement of face-to-face care during the covid-19 outbreak between March and 8 June 2020.

With National Health Services (NHS) services under intense pressure as COVID-19 spread, we ensured that we had as many beds available as possible to care for patients with severe respiratory problems during the COVID-19 pandemic peak.

To enable this, every hospital in England suspended non-urgent elective operations to free up additional capacity needed to assist with the COVID-19 response. With the pandemic easing, NHS providers are now expected to recover the maximum elective activity possible between now and winter, making full use of available capacity both in the NHS and in contracted independent hospitals.

Elective care activity is now ramping up, and by October we expect the NHS to deliver:

1. The same number of outpatient attendances, follow ups, scans and endoscopy procedures as October last year; and
2. 90% of the overnight elective procedures and day cases carried out last October.

Face to face dental care has resumed across primary care and, as set out above, is expected to be quickly ramped up in hospital dental departments that provide the equivalent of primary care dental treatment. Likewise, where inpatient care is needed for dental extractions requiring general anaesthesia (GA) services are expected to quickly recover the maximum elective capacity possible ahead of winter to help address any backlog.