Dental Pain Fuelling Employee Absenteeism
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- Published: Tuesday, 26 September 2023 09:39
- Written by Guy Tuggle
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In a country where our politicians seem to know the cost of everything and the value of nothing, from the Treasury’s standpoint the current NHS contract is a winner.
Millions of UDAs are delivered - at least to those able to access them - at a low unit cost ’conveyor belt style’. Any attempt to reform the formula will either see less work for the same expenditure or, horror of horrors, the same amount of delivery but for a bigger cost to the Exchequer. No wonder the profession is still lumbered with a contract it loathes.
Simplyhealth / Denplan’s 2023 Oral Health Survey engaged with over 5000 respondents and its findings show that failing to fix the broken NHS dental contract has cost implications for the economy that ricochet far beyond the cost of the dental service itself.
Dental pain, it appears, is a significant driver of employee absenteeism. Almost a third of the population - 28% - have had to excuse themselves from work because of it. Denplan say this equates to 11.7m working-age people. 7% of respondents confessed to having required over a week away from work so bad was their pain and it’s estimated 23m working days are lost.
The cost, to employers in lost productivity and employees in terms of lost earnings, is incalculable but, were the NHS dental service to be widely available and easy to access especially for patients experiencing pain, employee absence would be reduced and with it the cost.
NHS111 statistics reveal that some 85,000 calls a month concern dental pain. This accounts for one in twenty calls to the service.
Seizing on the survey’s findings, The Daily Telegraph quoted the experiences of ’Hannah’ from Ashford in Kent. Aged 25, she was "left in excruciating pain" by a root canal with an NHS dentist that went wrong and faced a long wait for a follow-up appointment to put it right. After suffering for a week she ended up paying a private dentist £650 for a Saturday consultation.
Hannah’s situation is not uncommon. A self-employed single mother, she said "If I don’t work, I don’t get paid. It was such a stressful time. I was at risk of losing clients". Because of her diabetes Hannah has to eat regularly and this was an additional challenge of her dental pain which ended up costing her £3000.
Catherine Rutland, clinical director at Simplyhealth (pictured) said, “Our Oral Health Survey is one of the most comprehensive pieces of research into dental consumers in the UK. The preliminary findings reveal that dental care provision in the UK is far behind where it should be, resulting in millions of working days lost to tooth pain.
People need certainty about how and where to access dental care in order to avoid the type of severe pain that is so debilitating that it requires time off work.
“We need to move to a model where NHS and private dentistry works together to ensure preventative care is prioritised" said Rutland. By catching problems early it "would avoid people having to take time off due to dental health problems".
Catherine Rutland ->
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