I have been unable to upload any entries for a number of weeks and the site has been down for a few days, so I want to catch up on a few items that I have not been able to write about in the past month or more.

The Sunday Telegraph had an article on October 21st about people going abroad for dentistry. I myself have been one of these people, getting dental work done in Malta by British-trained dentists at a fraction of the price in London. But this is still a small business and we should not lose sight of the bigger issue: the decline and fall of NHS dentistry. It is one of the services of the NHS that is simply falling off the back of the lorry, as this passage in the article makes clear:

In April 2006, when new NHS dental contracts were drawn up, they severely limited the number of treatments dentists could claim from the NHS. The supposed aim was to make the service less complicated. Instead, the result was that dentists flocked into the private sector.

While it is true that the number of dentists has increased from 15,000 in 1999 to more than 24,000 now, almost none works exclusively for the state.

Thus, in the past year, 1.4 million people have been left without access to a NHS dentist and, according to a survey by HSA, the medical payment plan provider, about 40 per cent of those questioned believed it was ''only a matter of time" before NHS dentistry disappeared altogether.

Needless to say, the private sector is booming. Virtually non-existent 20 years ago, it is now worth £2.4 billion. In 1990, for example, only five per cent of a dentist's income came from private patients. Today it is nearer 60 per cent.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in NHS

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