NHS or Private Care? It There More To It Than Cost?

NHS Dentistry has been a big part of many of our patients’ lives. For many of us, attending free dental examinations with the school dentist or your parents’ dentist has been a rite of passage in growing up.

This year has highlighted how important the NHS is to us and the wider society, but it is also important to understand how dentistry fits into the NHS service.

Dentistry is one of the few NHS services that patients are required to pay for. You generally do not pay for an appointment with your general medical practitioner and consultant at the hospital, but many of you are accustomed to paying for your dental examination and treatment.

We also understand the financial constraints the NHS is under and a recent survey by the British Dental Association, it found that investment in NHS Dentistry had dropped by 29% from the previous year. This was before the coronavirus pandemic and it is highly likely that less money will be allocated for dentistry.

In support of this, many patients will also notice that the cost of their dental examinations and treatments has also increased over the years with dental charges now accounting for nearly 29% of the national dental budget. This is set to increase further from the middle of December when the cost of dental treatment is to increase. This refers to the national budget that includes hospital-based treatments, so in reality, the patient charges paid for general practice treatments at a lot higher and closer to 80-90% of the treatment.

Patients often feel loyalty and a dependency on the NHS, and perhaps even a feeling of having paid for NHS dentistry through the taxes they pay every year. This however is not strictly the case. Since the reform of NHS Dentistry in 2006, the increase in patient charges has not benefited the dentists providing NHS care. What simply has happened is that the amount of money the NHS has contributed to NHS dentistry has decreased as the patient contributes more.

Now again, in certain circumstances, this might seem ok and beneficial, but the picture becomes a little blurred when you start to assess the service for what it offers and the benefits to all involved.

In most professions, and walks of life, you would associate a difference in cost with a difference in service. As a customer, looking for new shoes, you can understand why a certain pair of shoes may cost less than a different one. Both aim to provide a purpose but you can understand the difference.

The difference may be the service you receive - the waiting room environment, the clinical environment - comfortable leather chairs and modern equipment, but also the interactions. Time to discuss concerns and options for treatment. NHS dental treatments are categorised into 3 pricing bands, and the expectation that every dental treatment should be possible within this pricing structure with patients funding a large proportion of it should be queried.

The pandemic mandated the closure of dental practices and on reopening in July, it found our clinics to be operating two distinct tiers of dentistry. The Chief Dental Officer whose jurisdiction remains limited to NHS dentistry suspended routine dental care and told NHS practices to limit their dental care to emergencies and provide as few aerosol-generating procedures as possible. With the additional limiting factors such as fallow time, we found ourselves providing very limited dental care.

This was in contrast to Private Dentistry which could provide routine dental examinations and treatments provided appropriate risk assessments and personal protective equipment is worn.

It is an expectation that the current dental restrictions are to be kept in place until April 2021, but no further guidance of what will happen beyond has been given.

Many patients have called our reception teams and asked about their dental examinations, and understandably so, have been frustrated by the limited availability of the NHS service we have been providing. It has not been for a lack of trying, but with current restrictions, a single filling appointment has gone from being 15 minutes to 1 hour due to increased cleaning times. The increase in appointment times has hobbled a service that has slowly been underfunded by the government over the last decade.

S3 Dental remains committed to NHS Dentistry and fully understands how important the service is to our patients, but it also important for patients to realise that the service cannot be a one-stop-shop for all patients. The differing needs and demands of each patient when attending will necessitate options that may not available on the NHS or be the best option for treatment.

Since our reopening in July 2020, we continued to provide routine care to our Denplan and Private patients, and the decision to limit NHS examinations was not our choice but a mandated decision by NHS England.

If you wish to have a dental examination during these times, you can wait for NHS availability or you can consider a private examination.

If you would like to know more about the options available to you and how becoming a private dental patient will benefit you please give us a call to discuss, drop us a WhatsApp message, or email us to find out how we can help you.