Is the Labour Honeymoon Already Over?
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- Published: Wednesday, 28 August 2024 10:00
- Written by Peter Ingle
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The recently triumphant Prime Minister has had to abandon his summer holiday after widespread unrest and rioting. Now there are signs that the Governments NHS honeymoon may be coming to a cheerless end.
Despite trend setting pay increases doctors are still threatening industrial action. The news about dentistry has also become rather less upbeat.
There is some good news, but it remains in short supply. In the last few days the Weston-super-Mare area welcomed a new mobile dental unit intended to provide essential dental care to those experiencing homelessness and social exclusion. The initiative, led by the charity Dentaid, will help meet the oral health needs of some of the most vulnerable in society. The Health Lottery has been crucial in refurbishing, stocking, and preparing the new mobile unit, which relies upon volunteer dentists and dental nurses. The news from the NHS sector has not been so good.
Trawling local news there is the story of a pair of practices in the Callander area which have begun taking on some categories of new NHS patients after a two year hiatus. But they are still not back to the position before then, when they were taking on all groups.
The majority of changes remains NHS losses. Apart from the failure of the Astradent group, leading to the halting of NHS care in its eight practices, there are typically two or three local paper reports each week of individual practices handing back their NHS contracts or reducing their NHS provision.
In late August the Mirror ran a story headlined, “Most of the population is no longer getting NHS dental check ups because system is ’broken’ ” The paper continues to run its ‘Dentists for all’ campaign and petition. If these reports and campaigns have a familiar ring, it is because they could have come from any time over the last three or more years.
After some of their senior negotiators have met Ministers Wes Streeting and Stephen Kinnock, the BDA have issued a statement whose key points could have come from the last months of the Sunak administration.
Headed, “Tweaks at margin leave NHS dentistry recovery stalled” the message is bleak, with the BDA warning that “the future of NHS dentistry still hangs in the balance.” They may refer to, “unambitious policies from the last government” as the cause of the feeble recovery to services in the last year, but it is clear that they expect more than meetings. The BDA quote NHS Dental Statistics for England 2023/24 that show just 40.3% of adults were seen by an NHS Dentist in the 24-months up to 30 June 2024. Representing less than a single percentage point improvement over last year’s figures, it lags way behind the September 2019 figure of nearly 50%.
The numbers for both children’s appointments and total courses of treatment are similarly poor, and remain well below pre pandemic results.
The news on workforce is no more encouraging. The 0.5% increase in registered dentist numbers fails to recover ground lost since lockdown. The BDA point out that this data provides a head count but no idea of NHS commitment. Despite much evidence that more dentists reducing the amount of NHS work that they do, this is hidden in these figures.
These latest statistics cover the period that saw the rollout of the previous government’s Recovery Plan, and the BDA have reminded the new administration that it had pledged contract reform in its manifesto. The BDA repeated its belief that if this government is serious about keeping demoralised NHS providers on board, it will need to demonstrate both urgency and ambition.
Commenting, BDA Chair Eddie Crouch, made his expectations clear: “The reality is the recovery has stalled, and a new government needs to offer real change to give this service a future.”
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