Festival goers at Glastonbury sought dental treatment after having trouble finding appointments at home, according to a charity.
Festival Medical Services – which has organised the healthcare at all Glastonbury festivals since 1979 – saw an influx of people requiring emergency care.
Chris Howes is the charity’s managing director. According to The Guardian, he says many people were using its dental services from ‘very early on’.
‘We did notice that there are a lot of people very early on after we opened who were turning up with dental problems,’ he said.
Emergency care
Similar patterns were also seen among the charity’s staff and construction team.
‘We’ve seen a lot of the site crew, people working here on the build, who haven’t had access to a dentist, either because they don’t have one or they couldn’t get off [work] to see someone,’ he added.
‘We don’t offer routine check-ups or teeth polishing or anything like that – it is emergency dentistry that we do.’
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Service recovery
This comes as NHS England revise its performance level tolerance to ‘support the ongoing recovery of dental services’.
In a statement released last week, it stated that the normal contract tolerance level of 96% has been reduced to 90% for contractors delivering mandatory services. This will be for 2022/23 only.
The move was made to ‘support practices during the ongoing recovery of dental services’ and to ‘maximise access for patients’.
This means that any undelivered activity between 90 to 100% of that contracted will be carried forward into 2023/24 contract year.
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