Six-monthly appointments being scrapped for most adults to try to free up space for more NHS patients
The decades-old routine of visiting an NHS dentist for a six-month checkup is being scrapped across England and Wales for most adults as part of changes designed to address the dire lack of access to dental care for many people.
Wales has announced that most adults now only need to see their dentist once a year, which the government in Cardiff says will free up NHS dentists’ time and allow them to take on more than 100,000 extra patients annually.
The Labour-controlled Welsh government also hinted it wanted to recruit disillusioned dentists from England by offering chances to develop skills such as carrying out more complex surgery within their practices.
Its announcement came after the UK government wrote to NHS dentists last week saying that under the first changes to the dental contract in 16 years, healthy people will only need a checkup every two years. It said this complied with guidance from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice), which says dental teams should see patients for a checkup based on their health risk, which can be once every two years instead of every six months.
Both governments claimed the moves would allow more people to find NHS care but dentists’ representatives in England and Wales described the changes as “tinkering” and “marginal tweaks”.
The lack of access to dental care has become a controversial issue in England and Wales, where NHS dentists have been working under a contract introduced in 2006. Patients have reported being unable to get an NHS dentist, with some so desperate that they have resorted to DIY treatment, and there are growing fears that the shortage of dentists is worsening.
As part of its damning report on staffing in the NHS this week, Westminster’s cross-party health and social care committee said the dental contract system was not fit for purpose and urgent reform was needed to boost recruitment and retention of dentists.
Wales’s new chief dental officer, Andrew Dickenson, said new variations to the contract would make it easier for people to see an NHS dentist and for dentists to focus on those who need most help.
He said the “outdated practice” of recalling people for checkups every six months would help free up NHS dentists’ time and enable them to take on up to 112,000 new patients a year.
Dickenson said: “Most adults do not need to see their dentist every six months any more. By moving away from often unnecessary checkups, dentists will have more time to provide people with the personal, tailored care they need and free up space to take on new NHS patients.”
Rather than six-monthly checkups, dentists will create a personal care plan with people and advise them how often they need to come in. This will allow those who need more frequent care to be seen more regularly. Children and young people under 18 will continue to have six-monthly checkups.
The Welsh government is also aiming to recruit more dentists, especially to inner-city and very rural areas where it accepts access to an NHS dentist can be difficult. It wants to make becoming a dentist in Wales more attractive by offering extra training in more complex treatment such as extracting wisdom teeth or treating difficult gum problems and hopes dentists may be attracted from England and other countries.
Responding to the Welsh government’s announcement, the British Dental Association (BDA) said most dentists already extended the recall interval where they felt it would not harm patient wellbeing. It said a high proportion of patients in the most deprived communities would still require more frequent appointments.
Russell Gidney, the chair of the BDA’s Welsh general dental practice committee, said the claims about how many appointments could be created looked as if they were “cobbled together on the back of an envelope”and he called for “serious investment”.