Private Dentistry 'Increasingly Prohibitive' For Wannabe NHS Patients
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- Published: Wednesday, 08 January 2025 09:12
- Written by Guy Tuggle
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Millions of patients unable to access an NHS dentist either for an emergency or to receive ongoing care are finding the cost of seeing a private dentist increasingly prohibitive, a new analysis shows. So serious is the problem that The Guardian used the crisis as its New Year‘s Eve front page lead story.
Dental professionals are accustomed to private dentistry and its associated costs being used to trigger a ’greedy dentists’ narrative, however, the Guardian did not seek to blame dentists for the steep rise in fees.
The rising cost of running a dental practice, recruitment and retention pressures, spiking energy costs and a need to compensate practices for losses sustained providing certain NHS treatments lay behind private fees having increased by as much as 32% over the last two years.
’Patients can be billed £325 for a white filling, £435 to have a tooth out and in some cases £775 for root canal work. It means millions more people could face a double blow in 2025: inability to access NHS dental care and inability to afford to go private,’ the newspaper reported.
Had the Guardian jornalist found that all dentists were charging the same fees, they would have expressed shock and written "privtae clinicians operate a price fixing cartel".
According to a recent survey by Healthwatch England, one in five people, and two in five of those on lower incomes, already avoid visiting a dentist because of cost.
The government is due to outline some key proposals for NHS reform in the spring. It is not clear whether NHS dentistry will be a part of these. The Health Minister responsible for Primary Care, Stephen Kinnock, and his team are known to be in talks with the British Dental Association (BDA) and others, with contract reform widely acknowledged to be the top priority.
The Labour Party’s manifesto pledged to provide 700,000 urgent NHS dental appointments each year. How it will deliver this has always been unclear: the number of dentists providing NHS work has dropped by 483 since 2019-20 and of those who remain committed to the NHS, there’s scant data to quantify how many hours a week, how many UDAs or how many patients are seen by each dentist.
GDPUK knows dentists who maintain their NHS relationship but provide a minimal number of UDAs, perhaps confining their list to one day a week whilst others might undertake 7000 UDAs a year.
Public fury at the withdrawal of winter fuel payments to pensioners on low incomes and the continued arrival of dinghies carrying illegal migrants may have knocked dentistry off the top spot in MPs constituency correspondence, but as questions tabled weekly in parliament show, it’s every bit as live an issue today as it was before the election. And as opinion polls show, the public are in an angry and unforgiving mood. For many, the reality of private dental charges will only serve to pour rocket fuel on that anger.
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