LONDON (Parliament Politics Magazine): In the next months, 350,000 additional NHS dental appointments will be generated in England in accordance with the investment of £50 million made by the government to address the massive backlog caused due to the COVID outage.
Despite the additional expenditure, the British Dental Association warns that many clinics simply do not have the capacity to expand their burden.
Dentists will be paid more than a third extra to work outside of their typical hours and treat patients in the early mornings, evenings, and weekends under the initiative, which NHS England has dubbed a “treatment blitz.”
Prioritisation will be given to children, people with learning disabilities, autism, and people with significant mental health problems.
During the pandemic, over 600 urgent dental health hubs were quickly ramped up for delivering immediate care for patients, and the NHS is now getting vital services such as dentistry back to the levels as they were before the pandemic – injecting an added £50 million into routine services would assist in providing treatment and check ups for thousands of people, said England’s chief dental officer, Sara Hurley.Â
The “time limited offer,” according to Shawn Charlwood, chair of the BDA general dentistry practise committee.
He stated that a cash-strapped service risks being granted money it can’t spend after a decade of downsizing.
In order for this investment to make any difference, hard-pressed practices are working against time, and many may struggle to find resources before April.
Until now, no money from the government’s multi billion-pound catch-up scheme has made its way to dentistry. This is a step forward, but it must only be the beginning if service is rebuilt that millions could rely on.
