Emergency dentist? Ha!

[whatsadentist]

I live in a town of about 80k people. My DS hasn't had a dentist since his went solely private. He has relied on the emergency dentist. Unfortunately he has trouble with his teeth and has had to use them more than the average person.

There are no nhs dentists taking on and both the one my DH and I use, and the largest in the town are going private only, so things are going to get significantly worse.

DS phoned up today at 8am and was the first one through (he was told this) and was told he would get someone phone him back with an appointment. 10 mins later they did. The ONLY appointment the emergency dentists had was 20 miles away in our closest city.

The emergency dental service had ONE spot in a 40 mile radius of where we live.

i know the dental situation is bad, but bearing in mind the city has a population of 700k and we took the only emergency appointment I am wondering what has to happen for something to be done?

The city in question is the one where hundreds of people queued for hours to try to register with a new nhs dentist earlier this month.

Previously my DS has had to travel 80 miles to have a tooth extracted, only to discover that the dentist doing the extraction was the one that had seen him in our home town 3 weeks earlier at an emergency appointment!

At my previous dental surgery I saw an elderly gent come in to ask about an emergency appointment as one of his teeth had broken in half, only to be told that the wait for an NHS emergency appointment was three weeks or he could pay privately and come back the following day.
It was one of the last straws for me- I moved to another surgery and took out an insurance plan as a private patient.
I'm not sure NHS dentistry for all will ever be back in the form I would recognize.

Surely it's more expensive to rely on emergency appointments than to register at a private practice?

When I needed the emergency dentist when my tooth broke I had to travel over an hour.

I was in so much pain afterwards due to an infection. My own dentist would not see me at all and my GP said it was not their domain. I went to A&E and they told me to contact my dentist for an appointment within 24 hours...

I've got a private dentist now.

DD1 at uni with an abscess causing swelling and pain was told by the only dentist in the area that would even consider taking her, that they'd give her the first available emergency dentist appointment... 5 weeks away.
However what she did find was that at the weekends, you can go to A&E and be treated. During the week all 111 would say was find your own dentist. So she had it drained on Saturday morning and got antibiotics, and then came home the next weekend for our dentist to treat.

Our local one, I think has a note on her notes because she has major dentist phobia, so if she phones up, even for something small, they normally see her within the day, often all but straight away.

Most A and E departments will not treat dental problems because they have neither the staff nor the equipment to deal with them . Indeed doctors are told not to treat dental problems because they are neither trained nor indemnified to do so.

Previous to the new contract dentists had to provide out of hours emergency services . After the new contract health boards etc took over.

In our area which covers a very large area of the country and tens of thousands of people the only emergency service is two clinics on Saturday and Sunday which take 20 patients only .

Our local health authority deemed toothache no matter how severe is not classed as an emergency .

Dentistry has been neglected for decades , dentists have warned for decades and now eg the Nuffield Institute has said NHS dentistry , as we knew it , will never return as it would require an enormous investment no government would make.