Dental Queues in Bristol Return
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- Published: Tuesday, 11 February 2025 10:10
- Written by Peter Ingle
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For a city with a population of around half a million, Bristol has been the subject of more than its fair share of GDPUK stories. Most of these have been about the access crisis.
In 2023 Bristol suffered the closure of an inner city, mainly NHS practice, when BUPA declared it unviable. There followed stories of a chronic lack of access, community activists and politicians finding a subject that the population feel strongly about, and well organised protests and campaigns.
This culminated in the premises of the former practice in the St Pauls area of the city, reopening in February 2024 under new ownership. Once again it was in the news as police were called in to control long queues of eager would-be patients that had started forming in the early hours. After two days new patient acceptance had to be halted due to the overwhelming demand.
A few months later, a dentist at the practice was calling for help as a result of the shortage of dental personnel. One key change requested was improving the restricted access to the GDC administered Overseas Registration Examination(ORE) for overseas registrants that wish to work in the UK.
In 2025 there is a new government and a new team at the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) but Bristol remains one of the hardest parts of the country in which to find an NHS dentist.
As the practice celebrates a year since its revival in 2024 there have been similar scenes to those pictured when it reopened. The practice has taken on 13,700 NHS patients since reopening, with some travelling from as far away as Cornwall. It announced that it would take on a limited number of NHS patients in February 2025, to celebrate the first anniversary of its reopening.
Queuing began at 7am in the bitter cold and fog. Once again national papers have carried photos of the long line. One picked up on the former Chair of the British Dental Association’s GDP Committee,
Shawn Charlwood’s comparison with Soviet bloc queues for basic items and services.
Carla Denyer, Green Party co-leader and MP for Bristol Central, which includes St Pauls, said the "astonishing scenes" outside the practice was a "testament to how broken NHS dentistry is".
"A year later, things haven’t got better. Government data out last month showed that 94% of new patients who try to access NHS care fail to secure it – meaning that for new patients, NHS dentistry has essentially ceased to exist," she added.
It was a novel feature of the last election that the plight of NHS dentistry became a significant issue. As opposition health spokesperson, Wes Streeting visited the St Paul’s practice in February 2024 and said that the dental crisis was something that he wanted to tackle within days after the election. The promise of 700,000 more urgent appointments, he said, “would make a real difference, really quickly.”
A year later the queues remain in St Pauls and Carla Denyer is MP having ousted Labour’s Thangam Debbonaire. The problem, and the negative publicity now belongs to Mr Streeting.
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