Nuffield Trust response to government announcement on access to dental appointments

Responding to the Department of Health and Social Care announcement on access to dental appointments, Nuffield Trust Policy Analyst Mark Dayan said:

"These figures are good news both for the patients who received care, and because they show that staff and facilities are there to provide more care if the NHS can purchase it. The increase has been achieved directly by spending more: reducing the amount of money clawed back from dentists and taken out of the sector has meant over £300 million extra each year is going in. [1]

"The 1.8 million extra treatments are on top of around 20 million that NHS dentistry was already providing every seven months, so it is a significant increase but not transformative. [2] It's sensible to expand the remit from emergency cases – treating patients before their teeth deteriorate further is preferable for everyone involved.

"The government is stretching the edges of England's dysfunctional system for paying dentists, with a degree of success. But regional disparities remain severe, and shockingly, the majority of adults still get no NHS care. Properly fixing England's dental system will take either billions in extra funding, or a shift towards giving everyone the basics and preventing bad teeth in the first place, even if that means dropping some NHS commitments for those who can afford to go private."