To think Dentists are greedy and disgrace

[Thisismynamenow]

I have a hole in my tooth (thanks pregnancy for the poor teeth!)

My nhs dentist has apparentpy cancelled their nhs contract to go private (without telling patients) and not a single dentist within 20 miles is willing to take on nhs, but everyone can offer same day private appointments.

I know the nhs is underfunded but it's disgusting dentists are allowed to be only private, they should be made to be half nhs!

My tooth is killing me, I can't afford the £400 I've been quoted for the filling (it's a tiny hole, literally a pin hole!) And the hopsitall will only pull it which I don't want. Its annoying me more as i currently have a maternity exemption which I can't use.

Aibu to think dentists are greedy, and that it shouldn't be allowed?

You have to pass an aptitude test to get into dentistry, but will struggle to pass this unless you pay for private coaching. I wonder who will therefore do better in these tests...? 🤔
Coaching for an aptitude test is a bit of an oxymoron.

NHS dental waiting lists in England is 3 years, with many patients removed from lists for missing an appointment.

Wales is very slightly longer.

We are arguing about how many teeth a hen has!!!! Dental care is shite UK wide, the worst in Europe, by far.

My DD is 23 and has never had an NHS dentist and the EU Polish private dental practice that would treat her for NHS prices, upped sticks and left the UK after Brexit... no practices in Cornwall are taking on any new patients, i believe Devon is the same.

@ChickenDhansak82 20% are at private sixth form not 7%

You would think dental care is worst in Europe.... not so. Although we have low numbers of dentists compared to some , we have a higher number of dental schools .
Our decay rates are not too bad , at the moment , although our sugar consumption is very high compared to eg Spain.
As has been said before the U.K. is unusual in providing state controlled/run NHS dentistry . It is in modern times , where the cost of providing dentistry is exponentially increasing as technology improves , unsustainable.
The U.K. has only ever provided funding for 50% of the population to visit the dentist , but now even this funding is not enough to provide anything but a core service for the most vulnerable.
https://dentistry.co.uk/2020/05/27/uk-europe-dental-health-dentists/

No dentist would see someone privately but for NHS prices - that would be asking to go bankrupt.

The situation in local dentistry practices has changed considerably since Covid. That's the point posters are making. Practices advertising NHS lists don't have them in reality. Practices that served the local community and most vulnerable are now refusing to treat them, see them or add them to lists.
@Lollygaggle are you still practising? Are you in community or private practice? Old articles aren't addressing this fairly new, post-Covid shift.

The biggest post covid shift is, perhaps, people like myself. We are the older generation who manned practices despite our own health issues .

Many ,perhaps, would have gone on to work a few more years yet , but the stress and strain of the last few years has made them feel life is too short and so they have retired or cut down days.

Dental nurses , who again, worked in very ,very physically and mentally demanding conditions during covid are now leaving to work in eg Aldi where they get paid more for an awful lot less stress and responsibility.

Dental technicians whose laboratories received very little support during covid and less work because of restrictions are now closing or refusing NHS work because they cannot make a profit on NHS work and the investment needed for high end work is beyond their means .

I myself will probably never do clinical work again because of damage from long covid. I have other dental related jobs I do which I hope to return to.
I have/still work in private/NHS and other dental practice, train young dentists and worked, on occasion , overseas.

Practices are handing back contracts and/or refusing to take on NHS patients because NO ONE wants to do NHS dentistry . The rate at which you have to work is not good for patient or practitioner. There is no more money so things will not get better and indeed new reform contracts are making things worse.

The debts many practice owners accrued during covid to keep businesses going (dental practices received virtually no support in most of the country) means they now have to make hard choices to avoid going bankrupt , hence the rush to shut down or go entirely private.

Dentists aren’t greedy. The dental contract that they’re working under is so crap right now that for a lot of them, doing NHS work just simply doesn’t pay the bills. When you go and have a treatment and pay, say £23(ish) for the cheapest band of treatment, that money has to pay the dentist, the dental nurse, the receptionist, the cleaner, the rent of the building. It doesn’t go very far.

They get UDA’s (units of dental activity) and if the UDA is filled with private work then the money simply goes further. The NHS is struggling to keep dentists from going abroad after training because the financial conditions are so crap. Maybe one day it’ll change, who knows…

But the private prices reflect the real costs involved. The NHS prices were shielding patients from the true costs. I don't think it's unreasonable to pay a few 100 for a filling. Thems the breaks.

Dental health, is not the same as access to a dentist.

Did you miss out, in your link, the bit that says the UK has the lowest number of Dentists per Capita of any European country?

No I didn't , but Greece has the highest number of dentists , per capita , in the whole of Europe and almost the poorest dental health.
Access to a dentist is no guarantee , or even sole indicator , of oral health. Smoking, oral hygiene , sugar intake, snacking habits are equally important.

Absolutely but when you have to buy a filling kit from Amazon, perform your own extraction or children cannot see a dentist because you don't have access to an NHS dentist, then that really doesn't matter about a league table.

We do have very good dental hygiene in the UK, which is just as well.

1 in every 140 visits to AE is for dental issues.

The government will not increase dental school numbers by much as the numbers have always been solely increased or decreased according to NHS need. The problem is now , particularly in the last year , young dentists will no longer work full time in the NHS for their whole career.
This year , for the first time ever a significant number of newly qualified dentists did not apply for foundation training. If you do not do foundation training within 18months of qualifying you will never be able to work in NHS dentistry.
So for the first time ever young dentists are making choices completely out of the NHS system. I can only see this continuing and becoming more the norm .

The problem is not we are not training enough dentists, the problem is no one wants to work under NHS conditions any more.

We used to import many dentists and this is now becoming easier with less hurdles but , as those who have dentists that work in large corporate NHS practices know , they do not stay doing NHS treatment for long as they are appalled at what is expected of them under NHS treatment regimes. They move into private practice or back to their home countries.

By looking at dentist numbers you are looking at a symptom, not the cause of our dental crisis which is purely down to lack of investment.

In my cohort of dental graduates by 10 years in around 20% were not doing dentistry any more. Alternative jobs ranged from pilot,lawyer to cake maker. As the years go on more and more left dentistry. Now many of us are leaving early because ill health and the stress of the job has worn us down.

The other thing with dentist figures is,in the U.K., we have dental therapists, orthodontic therapists and hygienists , as well as dental nurses and oral health educators. Many countries do not have these professions so the dentist does all clinical work.
one of the bright ideas to ease the crisis was to use dental therapists to do the easier work, freeing up dentists. Unfortunately therapists rightly want to be paid a reasonable wage so in our area a therapist wants £50,000 a year but a new dental graduate who has a wider range of treatments they can carry out costs £35,000 a year , so the idea has not taken off.

i dont have to pretend to live next door to my nhs dentist,
if you are prepared to travel i dont think they turn you away?

So you think we own them for life. Ridiculous

I don't think the dentists are greedy as such for wanting to actually make a profit but Whereshouldlgo has hit the nail on the head of why it feels like such a kick in the teeth (pun intended) when you can't find a single NHS dentist in your local area.

It is exactly the same where I live in the North West and as I can't drive its even more difficult. I've had to go private using Denplan to get seen, there is something seriously wrong when people in one of the largest city's in the country can't find a NHS dentist.

The government need to sort this by providing better incentives for NHS work, lets face it if dentist were not just scrapping NHS provision they would be out on strike with the nurses and doctors. It is an absolute scandal.

Is an insurance based system the way forward? Some with good oral hygiene will not have to undergo much dental treatment at all in life and you could argue whether they should subsidise those that are reluctant to engage in rigourous mouth hygiene?

Although tooth ache is atrocious there must be a significant amount of work that is cosmetic in nature so dentistry to an extent does not have the life limiting features of other NHS services e.g. oncology

If you are concerned about dental care take out insurance in much the same way as your car

Oral cancer checks perhaps should be in the remit of the NHS though

Children's dentistry should remain in the NHS though

I have really good oral hygiene, floss, interdental brushes, electric toothbrush and sleep in a mouthguard
Still broke a tooth this weekend

Thankfully I have denplan, and they didn't need to drill, just used a putty type stuff? Not sure what that was if any dentist knows! He said it was like a filling but no drill/injections and sort of smoothed it with his finger and shaped it

Dentists do not regulate themselves . The general dental council chair is

Lord Toby Harris has spent his career working in the public interest, with a focus on consumer protection, security and policing, so not a dentist

the senior member is

Terry Babbs
Terry currently holds a number of other Non-Executive Director positions. He is Chair of HMRC's Valuation Office Agency- so not a dentist .

in fact 50 % of the committee are non dental related professionals. This is a source of much chagrin in the profession as most dentists feel the GDC do not understand dentists or dentistry and are far too ready to throw dental professionals under the bus.

ps the average dental student graduates with £80,000 debt , an amount they will spend a very long time paying back.

It was Labour under Bliar [sic] that completely ruined NHS dentistry in 2006. You can blame Tories for not doing anything to rectify Labour's disastrous reforms. NONE of the parties have plans to rescue NHS dentistry.

If MPs and their families were banned from accessing private dentistry, we would soon see a decent NHS dentistry service.

By looking at dentist numbers you are looking at a symptom, not the cause of our dental crisis which is purely down to lack of investment

As i said earlier, we need to pay dentists far more for the work they do for NHS work.
But even if we go back to the 80s and 90s, getting NHS Dental treatment was getting harder and harder.

We need more dentists and pay them properly for NHS work.

As i understand it, overseas Dentists have to jump through expensive hoops to come to the UK, visa's, health insurance, min savings, equivalence of qualifications and the time it takes.... why would e.g. a Greek dentist come here, when he/she can move to 26 other countries seamlessly?

The reason it got more difficult to access NHS dentists in the 90s is because traditionally only 50% of the population ever attended a dentist. In 1990 the government changed contracts to include , for the first time , a small payment to encourage dentists to register more patients.

It was a huge success and a much higher percentage of the population became NHS dental patients. As a result government spending on dentistry increased . So the following year they recouped the money by taking 10% out of every dentists payments . That was the start of widespread move into private practice.

In the early to mid 2000s dental access centres started to be set up , where dentists were employed and all equipment etc provided . This exposed the true cost of providing dentistry because in a traditional practice the practice owner does all the management side as well as clinical and because of the way they are paid dentists work at pace. The average cost , including patient contribution , of a course of treatment in NHS general practice is £36. In a centre , and the figures are quite old , the cost of a course of treatment is £420. To put this into context a hospital appointment cost is around£140 and a 15 min gp appt around £40 so the centre costing is much more realistic .

I've just had an email informing patients that a hygienist appt will now be £75 which is an increase of £10. Good grief!