Supporting the sector

07 June 2023

Supporting the sector

By Catherine Rutland, Clinical Director at Denplan

Dental services across the UK are at a tipping point. Significantly, the sector faces a recruitment crisis, which is having a detrimental impact on patients’ access to dentistry. Research by the BDA from earlier this year tells us that nine in ten NHS dental practices are not taking on new adult patients.

This has become a major concern to patients, sector professionals, policymakers, and regulators alike – and I am glad to see the issue being raised regularly in Parliament. So much so, in fact, that it is forcing the Government to prioritise tackling access to dental services.

Notably, during a debate on Dental Services in the East of England in May, Primary Care and Public Health Minister Neil O’Brien confirmed that: “Dentistry is the number one issue that I am working on… It is something that we are working on at pace.”

I welcome his commitment to our sector, and indeed appreciate the time he took to attend our parliamentary reception with the OHF in March, where I spoke to him at length about the key issues facing dental professionals today.

At the top of the list is the need to recruit more dentists, and at Denplan we have developed a series of policy asks for the Government to help address this.

First, to encourage more young people to become dentists, we believe that the Government should provide additional funding for more students to study dentistry.

Finally, we also need more international dentists to be able to live and work in the UK. It’s important that their qualifications are properly recognised here so we urge the GDC to develop and consult on the new framework for the ORE rules as soon as possible. We are also calling on the Government to enable special registration tracks to members of Commonwealth countries with a surplus of trained dentists, to encourage more dentists to move to the UK.

Taken together, these solutions would go some way towards alleviating the recruitment crisis facing our sector.

I am pleased that our sector is now at the top of the Minister’s priority agenda, and I look forward to continuing to work with him and his team at the DHSC to put forward solutions to improve access to dentistry.