Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask Her Majesty's Government what steps they are taking to mitigate the impact of (1) the limited availability of, and (2) the long waiting times for, dental treatments under general anaesthesia due to the COVID-19 pandemic, on children and vulnerable adults.

With 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, National Health Service 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:

- The same number of outpatient attendances, follow ups, scans and endoscopy procedures as October last year; and

- 90% of the overnight elective procedures and day cases carried out last October.

Dental extractions which require general anaesthesia and therefore are carried out in hospital are included in this recovery by the NHS.