Report on NHS Financial Sustainability Draws Dental Responses

Details: Published: Monday, 03 February 2025 09:21; Written by Peter Ingle; Hits: 1090

The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) were still calling for evidence into their Fixing NHS Dentistry Inquiry when they published their report on NHS Financial Sustainability. That report has already received some pointed responses from the dental sector.

Published on January 25^th 2025, the report starts by setting out the well-recognised challenges facing the NHS. The comments from the summary that follow may give committed NHS dental practices pause for thought.

“Given the extent of these challenges, both the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) and NHS England (NHSE) seem complacent regarding the NHS’s finances. NHSE is also relying on the extremely optimistic assumption that it will achieve unprecedented productivity improvements of 2% each year by 2028–29, as part of the NHS’s recovery.” The report refers to a “disregard for basic principles of sound financial planning.” Then, there are the, “transformations that are essential to the NHS’s recovery and future sustainability but saying them is not the same as achieving them.”

“We are concerned about the lack of fresh thinking and decisive action we heard from DHSC and NHSE. The scale of government’s ambitions is great, but senior officials do not seem to have ideas, or the drive, to match the level of change required, despite this being precisely the moment where such thinking is vital.”

The BDA in its initial comments, reminded the Government of the Nuffield Trust’s conclusion that NHS dentistry is at the most perilous point in its history. It described its exasperation that the Government’s ‘Plan for Change’ has ignored high street dentistry, instead choosing to focus ever more resource into secondary care.

One example of the second class status of primary care dentistry given by the BDA was how the recent Budget offers exemptions for hospitals from the increases in National Insurance, but there are as yet no mitigations for NHS dental practices, many of which are already delivering some NHS treatment at a financial loss.

Shawn Charlwood, Chair of the British Dental Association’s General Dental Practice Committee said: “Ministers say they want to shift the focus from hospital to community, but their spending plans tell a very different story. Primary care is the front door of the NHS and it’s clearly broken. Government needs to put its money where its mouth is and start fixing it.”

The Dental Defence Union (DDU) had some suggestions of its own. It was about time that the NHS enacted the long promised reforms aimed at controlling the costs of clinical negligence cases. Leo Briggs, deputy head of the DDU, referring to the need to ensure the NHS’s financial stability said: “Key to that must be to introduce legal reforms to the current clinical negligence system to protect NHS finances from further erosion. Not only will this help the system to cope with the challenges like tackling waiting lists, but it will also help the NHS to focus more money on recruiting and retaining more staff and improve their wellbeing.

“We are acutely aware that the current regime for clinical negligence claims along with workplace pressures has a profound impact on the welfare of dental professionals with many cutting back their hours or retiring early.” He referred to an earlier survey by the organisation, where 41% of respondents had said that they were planning to reduce their hours because of such pressures. 80% of those responding had said they feel negative about the future of the NHS. These sentiments hardly sat well with NHS ambitions to achieve unprecedented increases in productivity.

All of which leads back to another comment in the PAC report: “We are concerned about the lack of fresh thinking and decisive action we heard from DHSC and NHSE. The scale of government’s ambitions is great, but senior officials do not seem to have ideas, or the drive, to match the level of change required, despite this being precisely the moment where such thinking is vital.”

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