Bad Teeth And Bad Politics

Free dental treatment on the National Health Service (NHS) treatment ended in 1951, just three years after the NHS was formed, because it was deemed unaffordable.

NHS Dentistry

The vast majority of us opted for the subsidised system (where we paid for some of the costs) as 'private' treatment was too expensive. But over the decades an estimated one in seven adults moved over to private treatment (I'm not sure why ... presumably there are good reasons) ...

However this trend has meant that dentists have a real choice about how much NHS work they do as a proportion of their work and income ... this has resulted in a big big problem. A study by the BBC has shown that access to NHS dental treatment has been getting harder to get with nine in ten NHS dental practices across the UK not accepting new adult patients for treatment under the health service (this after the contacted nearly 7,000 of the NHS practices that still offered general treatment to the public).

Now I am a NHS dental patient, having been with the same dentist for 25 years, but if forced would pay for private treatment ... thankfully my dentist is still practising, although he's considering retirement in a few years. But for others, who can't afford private fees, the subsidised rates are the only way that they can afford dental care.

The report highlighted that the lack of NHS appointments has apparently forced people to drive hundreds of miles in search of NHS treatment, pull out their own teeth without anaesthesia, or resort to making their own improvised dentures, and restrict their long-term diets to little more than soup. People have turned to social media for temporary dental fixes, such as a form of plastic putty being stuck over broken caps. 

NHS Dental Charges

Where NHS patients are still getting treatment patients are often having teeth removed because it's a cheaper option, than actually saving the teeth which could involve several treatments. For instance, under private treatment it might cost £1,000 plus to have root canal treatment and a tooth crown, whereas just £80 to have it extracted instead, whereas the root canal and crown under the NHS is £282.80 and a tooth extraction £65.20.

The problems were exacerbated with the introduction of the current NHS contract in England and Wales in 2006 under Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair, which is unpopular with dentists, who feel under rewarded for the work they do under it. The Covid crisis and backlogs it created just accelerated the trend that had already been apparent beforehand. The British Dental Association says that the government is only providing 50% of the funding the UK needed to care for every patient, meaning half of the population were being left without an NHS dentist.

Of course the bigger picture is that in the NHS generally, there are long hospital operation backlogs and in GP practises its now hard to see a GP as they prefer 'telephone' interviews instead of face to face consultations. This again is another unexpected consequences of Covid that has accelerated underlying trends that had been there beforehand.

Our society is at a crisis point on several fronts .... inflation driven by the high oil price and Russian invasion of the Ukraine is going to hit everyone, but the poorest will be hit the hardest, and ditto the NHS hospital backlogs and NHS dental availability. These sorts of societal shocks always have unexpected political consequences, and we may be about to face a lot of political turbulence in both the UK, Europe and North America.