NHSreality has always felt that Dentistry and RHS cover is important. There are too many perverse incentives when the same provider makes the diagnosis as provides the treatment. It is time to separate prevention and assessment/diagnosis, from surgical treatment. It is also time to train more dentists so that the temptation to opt out of the Regional Health Service is less.. Getting a Health Service dentist is very much a lottery depending on your Post Code.
Tom Ough in the Times 16th June 2015 reports: Dentists demand a deposit from NHS patients
Prospective NHS dental patients are being illegally forced to pay a deposit before booking an appointment, an investigation has found.
One surgery even said that the deposit was non-refundable, while others advised researchers — who were posing as people seeking appointments — to find a private clinic instead.
The Which? investigation also found that a third of English NHS dental practices that say they will accept new patients are turning them away, reporting an “issue of poor information and lack of clarity in dentistry”. The NHS Choices website, which incorporates a directory of practices, requires surgeries to state whether they have room for new patients.
However, Which? found that 31 per cent of practices claiming to have space turned away prospective patients. Of those that did offer appointments, 29 per cent were unable to offer them within two weeks, with one practice citing a 13-page waiting list and another predicting a wait of two years.
The investigation was divided into two tranches: one in March and one in May, after the new financial year, in which dentists receive their new budgets. It found that even more dentists were unable to make good on their promise of space for new patients after the turn of the financial year. The disparity is thought by Which? to be a result of practices’ failure to update their entries on the NHS Choices site.
The investigation found that in many cases new patients had to jump through unnecessary administrative hoops before booking an appointment, including filling out forms in the surgery.
Which? has asked the Competition and Markets Authority to step in. Three years ago the Office of Fair Trading identified a lack of clarity about appointment times as a problem.
The best parts of the country for NHS dentist availability were the Cumbria, Northumberland, and Tyne and Wear area and the Kent and Medway area, with the worst found to be the Devon, Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly grouping and the Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire area.
Richard Lloyd, the executive director of Which?, said: “We want the Competition and Markets Authority to step in . . . so that people can easily find out where they can get NHS dentistry.”
Anna Bradley, of Healthwatch England, the patients’ watchdog, said: “Not only is the information available to patients constantly out of date, but our own mystery shopping has revealed that in some areas just a fifth of surgeries are actually accepting new NHS patients. We have heard reports of people having to travel up to 40 miles to find somewhere with appointments.
“Misleading information is just one of a catalogue of issues Healthwatch has been uncovering. In particular patients have reported feeling they have to have costly private treatments, such as hygienist appointments, to avoid being struck off the books, and in some cases patients fear that dentists are performing more basic treatments on the NHS, such as tooth extractions rather than doing more costly fillings.”
Fraud in Dentistry- a case from Scotland: ‘I’m ashamed any dentist could behave in this way’
Dentists warn of fee hike to fill gap in income
Paid for by the NHS, treated privately
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