The British Dental Association has said the National Audit Office’s damning verdict on the former Government’s Dental Recovery Plan underlines the need for fundamental reform in NHS dentistry.
The NAO states the ambition of securing an additional 1.5m treatments by the end of 2024/25 will not be met – and even if the target was reached it would still be 2.6m fewer treatments per year than pre-pandemic levels. The report states it is unclear how the final numbers in the plan were even arrived at. Former Minister Andrea Leadsom told the Health and Social Care Committee in March the modelling had “quite a high likelihood of not being reliable.”
Neither ‘Golden Hellos’ nor dental vans are on track to deliver anything resembling the volume of treatments they were estimated to deliver by March 2025. The report cites Ministerial disagreement on locations contributed to delays with the first dentist hired using a ‘Golden Hello’ payment in October. Not a single dental van has been procured to date. The BDA had argued vans represented very poor value for money for routine care.
In February, the professional body dubbed the Recovery Plan as “unworthy of the title” for failing to make any decisive break with the discredited NHS contract fuelling the access and workforce crises in NHS dentistry. It says these minor tweaks to a broken system, based on recycling existing budgets, represent a failed model for reform the new Government must reject.
Lord Darzi’s recent independent review of the NHS echoed the position of the Health Select Committee in two dedicated inquires, the Nuffield Trust and the dental profession itself, observing: “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.”
Shawn Charlwood, Chair of the British Dental Association’s General Dental Practice Committee said:
“We warned at the outset that this Recovery Plan was unworthy of the title.
“Unfunded, unambitious policies failed to make a dent in a crisis hitting millions.
“A new Government must show it is willing to learn from its predecessor’s mistakes.”