The Government has today announced that hundreds of thousands of people will soon be able to access urgent and emergency dental care as the government and NHS rolls out 700,000 extra urgent appointments, delivering on Labour’s manifesto commitment, including nearly 22,000 extra appointments in Norfolk.
Norfolk is considered a “dental desert”, with 60% of patients who tried to see an NHS dentist in the last two years unable to do so, with access to NHS dentistry increasingly a lottery across the country.
The bottom three ICBs with the lowest success rates for those who tried to get an appointment in the last two years (excluding “can’t remember”) were Somerset (53%), Norfolk and Waveney (60%), and NHS Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly (61%).
Terry Jermy, Member of Parliament for South West Norfolk said, “There was no bigger issue I have heard on the doorstep than lack of access to public services, especially dentistry. This is a massive step forward to ending Norfolk being the “dental desert” of the UK.
“Patients and NHS staff alike were let down by 14 years of underinvestment and failure to reform by the previous Conservative Government, which hollowed out local services. Nowhere was this more apparent than in NHS dentistry where it has become impossible for some patients to get any kind of appointment at all.”
Stephen Kinnock, Minister of State for Care said, “We promised we would end the misery faced by hundreds of thousands of people unable to get urgent dental care. Today we’re starting to deliver on that commitment. “NHS dentistry has been left broken after years of neglect with patients left in pain without appointments or queueing around the block just to be seen.
“Through our Plan for Change, this government will rebuild dentistry – focusing on prevention, retention of NHS dentists and reforming the NHS contract to make NHS work more appealing to dentists and increase capacity for more patients. This will take time but today marks an important step towards getting NHS dentistry back on its feet.
Only recently there was appalling footage of patients queuing round the block in some parts of England. Nationally, after more than a decade of failure, the Tories shockingly left millions waiting for treatment. They brought in a New Patient Premium scheme that didn’t have any impact for new patients, with new figures revealing that £88 million was wasted on the scheme.
Jermy concluded by saying, “This is a critical step forward as the Labour Government begins to fix the broken system left behind by the previous Conservative administration.”
