The Scottish Government are continuing to fall short of its promises to improve dental care access across Scotland, and its underfunding of dental practices has helped create a crisis in the industry.
A recent BBC investigation found that 80 per cent of NHS dental practises were no longer accepting new child patients, leaving approximately 250,000 Scots without public dental care. This throws cold water on the promises made by the Scottish Government to provide free dental care to all children.
Furthermore, a quarter of local councils in Scotland had no open positions for taking on new adult dental patients. Half of the local councils had under 10 per cent of positions open to new patients, making it increasingly difficult for Scots to find new dental clinics after moving or having children. Overall, the report shows how dentistry in Scotland is becoming a postcode lottery, which threatens to affect the dental health of thousands of Scottish children based solely on where they live. While rural areas are most affected by this shortage in dental clinics, this is a national problem which sees most areas struggling to find nearby clinics for new families or people moving into the area.
This crisis has been building for months, since emergency funding for dentistry was cut in February, a motion opposed by the Scottish Conservatives, alongside other opposition parties. From April to June this year, dental practices received a 1.7 multiplier to the fees paid to provide NHS care, however, this was then cut to 1.3 from July, with dentists claiming this fails to cover the increasing costs of overheads. It is disappointing to see that, despite the warnings, the availability of dentist clinics in Scotland has continued to deteriorate, leading to the current position. This most recent investigation follows a range of reports from the BBC finding that numbers of dental treatments continue to struggle to reach pre-Covid levels and that dental centre closures during the pandemic have created an unprecedented backlog in Scotland.
Without good access to NHS dental facilities, many Scots could become forced to deal with long waiting lists and expensive procedures which had previously been available and covered by the NHS. This is likely to widen the inequality for BAME children, who are already at a higher risk of tooth decay according to a UK-wide report. This report found that since some minority groups choose to use dental services for symptom-related appointments instead of regular check-ups, the lack of available space at such clinics will disproportionately affect them.
Shawn Charlwood, Chair of the British Dental Association's General Dental Practice Committee said:
“NHS dentistry is at a tipping point, with millions unable to get the care they need and more dentists leaving with every day that passes. We're seeing the results of years of chronic neglect, set into overdrive by the pressures of the pandemic. The question now is will Ministers step up before it's too late?”
This is a crisis of the Scottish Government’s own making, as it declined to continue funding dental health services at a time when such clinics were clearly at risk of hitting their capacity for new patients. Because of this, vast swathes of the country have no nearby dental health clinics at which families can register young children, stunting oral health at the time in life it is most needed.