Gaby Bissett speaks to Robert Witton, chief executive of Peninsula Dental Social Enterprise (PDSE), about the new community dental practice that will help to train students – and provide much-needed urgent care to the community.
Why have you set up the Peninsula Dental Education Practice?
We first proposed the idea of a free urgent dental clinic quite a few years ago – I’d say the genesis of the project has been probably six years in the making.
The reasons were really twofold. Peninsula Dental School is one of the smallest dental schools in the country and we would like to expand dental student numbers. Having an extra clinical site gives us some extra space, and, as a result, we can accommodate more students in the future – depending on the outcome of the NHS long term workforce plan.
The other reason driving the project was the transition students go through from dental school to dental practice. We know that move is quite a significant one. Our students currently train in large dental education facilities and whilst they are some of the best in the world, they don’t really resemble what a typical high street dental practice is.
The idea of the practice is that final year students will rotate through it to help them get as work ready as possible and more prepared for the realities of a practice.
The centre will operate like a practice, so it will have a slightly different tempo from the teaching clinics. We think that will be good for our students.
How will the model work?
There will be a mixed economy in the practice. So alongside the dental students delivering free urgent dental care, we will also be transferring other services into the clinic.
We’ll have qualified clinicians in the building. Part of the idea was to bring a multi-disciplinary team together – two general dentists seeing patients, but also a dental foundation dentist, a foundation dental therapist and a specialist oral surgery service. This is so A, it gives the best possible care to patients, but B, provides a really rich learning environment for dentists in training dentists and dental therapists.
We want to have a start to end pipeline for training. Someone could come to join us as a dental therapy or dental student, and they can potentially do their dental foundation training with us, further postgraduate dental training or even specialisation. It creates end-to-end training, crucial in a region like ours where it is hard to recruit and retain dentists. The south west is one of the slowest recovering regions post-pandemic when it comes to dentistry. There’s a register of interest for an NHS dentist, and in Plymouth city alone, there are more than 22,000 patients on that list.
At PDSE, we have a really strong community ethos. We’ve been driven in developing this partly by the community need, but also to focus on training dental students and the next generation of dental professionals.
Why is it so unique?
Most dental schools have a dental casualty department but it tends to be in the dental hospital. This new clinic will be different – it will be a real mixed model of dental delivery right on the high street. The urgent care delivery is not that unique, but the overall design of the practice is.
A few years ago, Health Education England, just before they were disbanded, published a report called the Advancing Dental Care review. Within that, they proposed a model called ‘Centres for Dental Development’. This practice is not quite the same as that, but it is very similar to those ambitions in that it is trying to create outreach centres that provide the full pipeline of training.
When will the centre be opened?
We worked closely with the local authority to find the premises and that did take some time. Trying to find a suitable premises for 14 dental chairs in a city centre location is actually harder than it sounds. Plymouth City Council were been really supportive and identified a retail unit for us.
We took over the lease of the building earlier this year, and we’re just about to appoint contractors for the fit out of the practice. We hope to be open by the end of the year.
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