A dental practice in Bristol drew a queue of more than 100 people as it announced it would be taking on more NHS patients.
In February 2024, police broke up a queue of people attempting to access NHS dental care at the newly-opened Saint Pauls Dental Practice in Bristol. To celebrate its first anniversary, the practice announced it would be taking on 100 more NHS patients.
Similarly to last year, 6 February 2025 saw a queue of more than 100 prospective patients form along Ashley Road outside the practice.
Saint Pauls Dental Practice opened on the site of one of 85 dental practices which closed across the country in 2023. Local residents launched a campaign to prevent the closure and subsequently campaigned for it to reopen. They succeeded in persuading the local integrated care board to reopen the practice in 2024.
Operations manager Shivani Bhandari said: ‘It’s not as bad as last year. We can only accommodate 100 but I can see there’s more than 100 outside. So we can’t help them, we’re just a small practice. We can’t solve the problem, but we are here to help.’
‘A testament to how broken NHS dentistry is’
Saint Pauls’ principal dentist Gauri Pradhan said the scenes demonstrated ‘total neglect’ of dentistry by the UK government. She said: ‘It’s desperate. The queue is not as large, but you can see the need is evidently still there. It’s total neglect.
‘We’re excited to help this many people. Ideally we wouldn’t want any queue, we would want it seamless, but you can’t control the people. There is a lot of demand.’
Gauri added that the patients had come from throughout the country to seek NHS care, including Wales, Torquay and Cornwall.
Saint Pauls Dental Practice sits within the Bristol Central constituency that elected green MP Carla Denyer in the July election. Speaking to Bristol Live, she said: ‘The astonishing scenes we saw outside St Pauls dental practice in Bristol this time last year were a testament to how broken NHS dentistry is, and a year later things haven’t got better.’
‘Scenes that belong outside bakeries in the Soviet bloc’
Health secretary Wes Streeting visited the queuing patients on 7 February 2024. He said: ‘This queue is almost a visual representation of the depth and scale of the crisis we see in NHS dentistry and talking to people here in the queue this morning who were here at the crack of dawn before the sun came up.’
Streeting said it was ultimately ‘up to politicians to fix this crisis’, saying the Labour Party had ‘a serious plan for rescuing and rebuilding the National Health Service’.
The British Dental Association (BDA) said there had been ‘no material progress’ since the previous queue was broken up last year. General Dental Practice Committee chair Shawn Charlwood said: ‘We have a new government, but it feels like more of the same for NHS dentistry.
‘Wes Streeting says he wants to take the NHS “back to basics”. Ending scenes that belong outside bakeries in the Soviet bloc would be a good start.
‘Making promises won’t restore access to millions, only action will.’
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