The UK has had national dental care for decades. There are some interesting challenges with that, of course....
Pliers, abscesses and agonising pain: Britain’s dental crisis – as seen from A&E
With ‘dental deserts’ all over the UK, hundreds of thousands of people now flock to hospitals or GPs each year for treatment. And the problem is only getting worse
When Lucy finally found a dentist that would accept
NHS patients, she asked if she could join with her family. She lives in Devon with her husband and two children and none have access to an NHS dentist. “They said no,” she says. “So I asked them to take my children, not me or my husband, but they said they couldn’t take the children without an adult.” But they weren’t taking new adult patients, either.
Routine private checkups are too expensive, so they opt only for urgent care, and only to the level they can afford. She has just paid £400 to have a tooth pulled – she could have had a filling, but that would have cost £500 and she couldn’t justify the extra expense. “My children not having a dentist really worries me. I nag them a lot to brush their teeth. What’s the alternative?”
Lucy is right to worry. Tooth decay is the
biggest primary cause of NHS hospital admissions for children in England aged between five and 17, as
40% of children no longer have access to regular dental appointments. Between April 2022 and May 2023, 30,000 children and more than
70,000 adults in England were admitted to A&E with tooth decay. As Matthew Taylor, chief executive of the NHS Confederation,
said last year: “Accident and emergency departments are overflowing with people in severe dental distress.”
With ‘dental deserts’ all over the UK, hundreds of thousands of people now flock to hospitals or GPs each year for treatment. And the problem is only getting worse
www.theguardian.com