News comes as Good Morning Britain hears this morning from Jacqui Nicholson from County Durham, who was desperate for an NHS dentist after a two-year wait and fell victim to a scam she found on a website promoted by someone she trusted on social media.
She paid £53 each for appointments for herself and her husband, reassured by the NHS logo, prepayment option, and a detailed email confirmation. When she discovered it was a scam, Jacqui contacted her bank but feared her refund claim might come too late.
Needing urgent dental care, she felt deeply embarrassed, saying, “It looked so real... I even Google Mapped it.” Her advice: “It’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s fake. Don’t fall for it.”
The BDA understands fraudsters have already targeted patients in Norfolk, Essex, Suffolk, Devon and Merseyside using professional looking websites to secure pre-payments of up to £319.10 for care.
The professional body has welcomed the constructive tone set by the new Government but has stressed that urgency and ambition are now required to deliver pledges to reform the broken contract fuelling workforce and access crises in the service.
Lord Darzi’s recent independent review of the NHS observed: "If dentistry is to continue as a core NHS service, urgent action is needed to develop a contract that balances activity and prevention, is attractive to dentists and rewards those dentists who practice in less served areas.”
The BDA has expressed concern that pledges to provide new funding for 700,000 urgent care appointments appear to have been dropped in the recent Budget, and warned that practices need support to cover significant new overheads generated.
BDA Chair Eddie Crouch said:
“Criminals are now preying on desperate patients left with no options.
“We need real urgency and ambition from Labour on NHS dentistry. Fraudsters will keep seeing real opportunities as long as the new Government’s promises remain unkept.”
Health Secretary Wes Streeting told Good Morning Britain:
“I want to thank the British Dental Association for raising awareness of these kinds of scams, and we’ll be looking at what more we can do within the law to clamp down on that.
“They’ve done the public a real service this morning in giving some practical advice and help to avoid other people being taken in.
“But Eddie Crouch is also right that we need to stop the rot in NHS dentistry which has been allowed to continue for far too long.
“Eddie was just in the Department this week, with the British Dental Association meeting the Minister for Care.
“Now the Chancellor has set the budget and the spending review totals for the next few years, we can negotiate the dentistry contract to deliver on our manifesto commitment of 700,000 more urgent dentistry appointments, but also to do the wider fundamental reform that NHS dentistry needs. So we will continue those negotiations and report back.”