Campaigning Red-top Shocked as Leading Corporate Increased Private Workload
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- Published: Monday, 30 December 2024 10:09
- Written by Peter Ingle
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The Mirror has been one of the papers giving heaviest coverage to the NHS dental access crisis. Its ‘Dentists for all‘ campaign was launched early in 2024 with support from the BDA.
At the time BDA chair Eddie Crouch, said: “A wealthy 21st century nation has seen its citizens pulling out their own teeth with pliers, while others queue from the crack of dawn to access care. Underfunding and failed contracts, the crisis millions face is the result of political choices. The Mirror is showing leadership we desperately need to see from Westminster.”
There may be less enthusiasm for the Mirror’s latest story about dentistry. It describes how, “Dental giant MyDentist rakes in millions of pounds as surgeries abandon NHS.”
The paper reports that Britain’s biggest dental business, which runs more than 500 practices with over four million patients, has tripled the size of its private work and seen profits “soar” amid the continuing access crisis. The paper’s investigators called 100 practices on the company website specifically listed as “NHS and private.” But even among those which it says are NHS practices, only nine out of 100 were taking on new adult patients when called. Furthermore, the paper reported: “Many played a waiting message pitching its private treatment, offering ‘the dental care you’ve always dreamed of’”.
MyDentist denied that it has a deliberate strategy to stop taking new NHS patients and told the Mirror it is an individual dentist’s decision how much NHS provision to take on.
The paper went on to explain both the cuts in funding to NHS dentistry since 2010, and the issues around the UDA contract.
The paper quoted Cat Hobbs, of We Own It, a pressure group that campaigns against privatisation, who said: “It’s scary to see this rapid downhill trend towards a two-tier system, where those with money get treatment, and those without reach for a pair of pliers.
“Huge private providers are consolidating operations to follow the money, leaving NHS patients in dentistry deserts. People are turning to DIY dentistry solutions and often end up in A&E.”
Not to be outdone was Dr Tony O’Sullivan, of Keep Our NHS Public, who said: “Past government policy has driven dentists into private practice and the arms of corporate parasites. Huge dental profits show private healthcare is a one-way street towards a two-tier NHS.”
The latest accounts for MyDentist’s parent company say that in 2024, their: “dentists have continued to allocate more time to private dentistry services” and that for the first time its revenue was “broadly evenly split between NHS and private dentistry”.
This compares to five years ago when private dentistry made up just 22% of MyDentist revenue.
In 2024 accounts for MyDentist parent firm Turnstone Equityco 1 show private dentistry revenue was £271million or 47% of the total revenue of £572m.
The Mirror added two further items of information on the background to the changes at MyDentist:
In 2019, private dentistry revenue was £104m or 22% of total revenue of £463m. Its private revenue has grown 160% (108% after inflation) while its NHS revenue is down 16% (33% after inflation) over five years.
MyDentist remains “by far the largest dental corporate in the UK”, despite closing 73 practices and selling 56 more from 2018 to 2024, reducing the total number of practices it operates from 674 to 534.
Hopefully, Cat Hobbs and Dr O’Sullivan will have read the full Mirror article in which they are quoted, as it might give them some clues about why MyDentist’s mix of work has changed, and what happens to practices that fail to adapt.
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