NHS dental services in 'death spiral', councillors warn

DESPERATE people are performing their own dental work because of a chronic shortage of NHS provision in the region.

Councillors said the system was in a “death spiral”, with an increasing number of practices going private and dentists leaving the area or the profession altogether.

A family of Ukrainian refugees had even travelled back to their war-torn homeland because they could be seen there quicker, a council meeting heard.

South Gloucestershire Council health scrutiny committee members said they were not reassured and that wholescale changes were needed.

In 2020 the Frampton and Flaxpits surgeries, in Park Lane, Frampton Cotterell and Flaxpits Lane, Winterbourne, stopped all NHS treatment, telling their 14,000 patients they would have to go private or go elsewhere.

Another South Gloucestershire dentist, My Dentist in Staple Hill, told patients in January that three NHS dentists had left and were being replaced by a private practitioner.

New Cheltenham ward councillor Sandie Davis said: “There is a family who took in some Ukrainian refugees and they couldn’t find a dentist so they travelled at Christmas back to war-torn Ukraine to see a dentist. It’s just shocking.”

Frenchay & Downend ward councillor James Griffiths said: “We’ve had local dentists go private and send a letter to all the residents saying,‘you’ve no longer got an NHS dentist and if you’ve got a family of four, please can we have £600 a year’, depending on the package.

“It’s a death spiral because as more and more people go over to the private sector, they can then pay them more, the NHS service gets worse each year and it will slowly degrade and more people will go over.”

Cllr Griffiths said dentists had told him they got paid between £30,000 and £60,000 a year more to treat the same patients privately than on the NHS.

NHS South England head of stakeholder engagement Lou Farbus told councillors there was a "workforce crisis" across all clinical and social care in the region.

NHS England South West director of dental, specialised and health and justice commissioning Steve Sylvester told the meeting in late January: “A lot of work has been done nationally in terms of the contract where you get paid one rate for NHS and another for private provision.

“Our ability to control and influence practices is hampered. They are independent businesses in the main.

“This is a big tanker to turn around. It’s been sailing in the wrong direction for a number of years.

“The challenge we face is we don’t have a right to be registered with a dentist – it’s not a GP practice.

A report to members said the percentage of adults with NHS dentists in South Gloucestershire had fallen steadily in recent years and stood at 36.7% last June, a 5.9% drop in 12 months.

This was lower than the access rate for England as a whole, at 37.4%.

The number of children who saw a dentist rose by 12.3% to 42%, although this was still below the national average of 46.9%.

By Adam Postans, Local Democracy Reporting Service