More dental treatment for Wiltshire?
A promising government announcement turns out to have less substance than we might have hoped for.
More? Or less?
A big new brassy announcement from central Government this morning informed us that some 700,000 extra urgent dental appointments will be made available across the country.
The focus is on those areas perceived as dental deserts, where getting access to an NHS dentist is nigh on impossible. Happily Government seem to recognise that the South West is one of those areas.
Bath and North East Somerset, Swindon and Wiltshire ICB will get 13,990 extra urgent dental appointments. Which sounds pretty good. Especially given the crisis in accessing NHS dentists across Wiltshire.
Until of course we compare what Wiltshire is getting with our neighbours:
Somerset ICB 13,498 extra appointments
Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire ICB 19,076
Some context is needed here. Somerset ICB serves around 560,000 people. Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire ICB serves just over 1 million and Bath and North East Somerset, Swindon and Wiltshire ICB 940,000.
Looking at the figures with reference to the population served, Somerset ICB appears to have by far the best per head deal of the three. Wiltshire as part of Bath and North East Somerset, Swindon and Wiltshire ICB is very much the poor relation.
Those then are the numbers but what does it mean in practise? We are told that patients will be able to access these appointments by contacting their usual dental practice or calling NHS 111 if they don’t have a regular dentist or need help out-of-hours.
This is just the first step in a recovery plan. Stephen Kinnock, Minister of State for Care acknowledges as much: “We promised we would end the misery faced by hundreds of thousands of people unable to get urgent dental care. Today we’re starting to deliver on that commitment. “NHS dentistry has been left broken after years of neglect , with patients left in pain without appointments, or queueing around the block just to be seen.”
So far so good. But we wondered why there were no figures for funding attached to the announcement? We checked with the Department of Health and Social Care this morning and they confirmed that there was no extra funding. ICBs are expected to fund the extra appointments from existing budgets.
ICBs are expected to fund the extra appointments from existing budgets
Which leads us to ask if this is really extra appointments. All that is happening we now know, is that the Department of Health and Social Care is writing to ICBs to tell them to implement this policy.
Which begs two questions:
If they have the funds, why were they not doing this already. And if they were doing this already will these actually be extra appointments?
And if they don’t have the funds, what other health services will suffer if money has to be taken from somewhere to fund extra dental appointments?
Making sense of that is enough to give you a headache, if not actual toothache.