NHS Dentist

[justamum98]

Hi,

as most of you have noticed the dental service in this county is awful.

I don’t have an nhs dentist. Haven’t for many years. And none are taking on new patients. I check regularly and checking almost 2 hours away from home but still no luck. My partner has the same issue.

he currently has an infected tooth which he suspects will need removing. He’s had an off and on issue with this tooth for years but it’s finally because too painful and painkillers aren’t doing anything.

He phoned 111 and they gave him a number to a local dentist but when he rang, they’re private? Not nhs.

what are people meant to do that can’t afford private prices? I was honestly shocked 111 gave us a number to a private practice. It’s not why he called them, he needs an nhs dentist to help him because he can’t afford the private one.

what do people do. Honest question because if the only answer is to go private then why do we pay NI to contribute to these dental services we cannot use (nhs in other ways ie great and other than long queues at hospitals we’ve never had an issue).

but like does everyone feel like nhs is on its way out? Like they want everyone to go privately for everything. Such a shame.

Dental schools offer discounted treatment.
private dentist and payment plan?

“but like does everyone feel like nhs is on its way out? Like they want everyone to go privately for everything”

Absolutely this. The service has been chronically underfunded for years. They could solve it but don’t want to spend the money it would require or think outside of the box for a better long term solution to spend the limited money available on. Offer partial funding to train more dentists who are then contracted to work within the NHS for a time period. Except if they did this, they’d also have to put more money in the system to create NHS funded jobs for them to go into once they qualified. Change the NHS dental offering completely to a service that prioritises children and teaching them how to better care for their teeth so they grow up to be adults with fewer problems. At the same time streamline the adult service to a good accessible service doing mainly simple fillings and extractions to put people out of pain. If they can’t pay for everything, decide which bits are most important and put the money into a robust service there. Instead of poking pathetically around the problem without actually making anything better. It’s a shambles.

Phone 111 again. Most areas will have a NHS service for toothache . They should not have directed you to a private dentist , but NHS dental lists are very outdated in some areas.

NHS dentistry is not free though, even as an emergency, so he would still need to pay towards any assessment and treatment.