The Member of Parliament for Winchester and Chandler’s Ford has welcomed the Government’s plan to recover and reform NHS dentistry as the right approach.
During a statement to the House of Commons, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, outlined their plans to make dental services faster, simpler and fairer.
The Secretary of State outlined the aims as to improve dental services by making them:
- faster for patients through our new patient premium to support dentists to take on new patients and a new marketing campaign to help everyone who needs one to find a dentist
- simpler for patients and for dental staff by streamlining and tackling bureaucracy, with a wider set of workforce reforms to maximise the skills across the entire dental clinical team
- fairer, particularly for our rural and coastal communities, by introducing new dental vans to bring dental care to our most isolated communities, offering ‘golden hello’ incentives to encourage dentists into under-served areas and supporting those practices with the lowest rates of payment for their work
These ambitions comes shortly after the Health and Social Care Select Committee’s report into NHS Dentistry and the Chair, Steve Brine MP, has assured the House his committee “will study it carefully” and invited the Secretary of State, Victoria Atkins MP, to talk Members through the plans.
Whilst Mr Brine has welcomed the ‘golden hello’ incentives, toothbrushing for pre-schoolers and the mobile vans, he has raised concerns of continued use of the current UDA contract.
The MP has asked the Government how they “plan to entice professionals to return to NHS dentistry”.
Victoria Atkins responded to Steve Brine’s concerns highlighting the new patient premium which will mean “from next month, dentists will be able to turn their closed signs to open for NHS patients” which will aim to deploy leaving dentists immediately.
NHS Dentistry and more generally oral health has been a key focus for the previous two episodes of Steve Brine’s podcast, ‘Prevention is the new cure’.
More Information
Health and Social Care Select Committee’s NHS Dentistry inquiry
