
More urgent dental appointments and free dental clinics are among some of the measures being taken to tackle the NHS dental crisis.
Plymouth will see the opening of a new clinic where dental students will provide free care to patients who have struggled to access NHS dentistry.
Drawn from the University of Plymouth’s Peninsula Dental School, final year dental students will work alongside specialists to provide the treatment.
Day appointments will be available for people who experienced pain, infection and also trauma.
Over the coming months, and subject to planning permission being granted, it will be renovated through a £5 million project. After the revamp, this will be home to the new Peninsula Dental Education Practice.
According to Peninsula, the new practice will go some way to filling the huge demand for dental care in Plymouth. The area is experiencing long waiting lists across all NHS providers and a lack of practitioners to meet the demand.
Robert Witton is a professor of community dentistry and chief executive of Peninsula Dental Social Enterprise (PDSE). He said: ‘We are proud of our record of providing first class clinical experience to our undergraduates in a community setting by treating thousands of patients who otherwise would not receive NHS treatment. But we know there is an urgent need for more dental care services.
‘That is particularly the case here in the South West, and this new clinic – our fifth in Devon and Cornwall – could be a real game-changer. It will provide our students with hands-on experience that bridges the gap between their training and going into practice.
‘It could also transform the lives of the extra people we are able to treat, with the real possibility that many of them have been waiting months or even years to see a dentist.’
Urgent dental appointments
In East and West Sussex, more urgent dental appointments are being made available following a pilot programme tested across both counties.
According to Sussex Health & Care, patients will be able to book same-day appointments and also longer-term courses of treatment.
The aim is to cover all local authority districts by the end of February 2025.
Nish Suchak, chair of the Local Dental Committee for East Sussex and Brighton and Hove, described the collaboration that was required to introduce the appointments as ‘heartening’.
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