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Last week’s general election gave the country its first all-Conservative government for 18 years, so what can we expect? The consensus of opinion at the BDA Conference was, as far as dentistry is concerned, not a lot. There is some validity in this view as the minister responsible for dentistry (Lord Howe) was a conservative,…
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When NHS England announced the appointment of Sara Hurley as chief dental officer (CDO), it ended weeks of speculation, some well-informed, much not so. As a former dental officer in the Royal Army Dental Corps, I am probably biased in welcoming the current head of the Army Dental Service to her new appointment. However, her…
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I read Kevin Lewis’ blog last week on the Dentistry website about the permutations of the Government in the event of a hung parliament. I also saw the British Dental Association’s (BDA’s) expression of regret that none of the manifestos of the major parties mentioned dentistry. This will be the 14th general election at which I…
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To work in the NHS as a dentist you need to have been on a performer’s list. To be admitted to this list, you need to be a dentist qualified in the European Economic Area (EEA) or to have completed dental foundation training (DFT) if you trained in the UK. Having spent a great deal…
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The rather abrupt departure of Barry Cockcroft as chief dental officer (CDO) for England and the delay in announcing his successor raises questions in my mind. Add to this the strong rumour that his successor is not one of the obvious candidates and has no direct experience of working in the NHS and I am…
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Recently two NHS employees were involved in the theft and resale of £75,000 worth of dental equipment, taken from health board properties in Edinburgh. They were jailed for nine months. The items were sold on Ebay and the thefts came to light when a dentist, who had purchased some of the equipment, contacted the manufacturers…
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Recently there has been some more positive news about private dentistry. First the National Association of Specialist Dental Accountants and Lawyers (NASDAL) reported that profit for private practices had edged ahead of those in the NHS for the first time in nearly a decade. The difference was small, with a private dentist making a profit…
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Henrik Overgaard-Nielsen will be the 17th chairman of the General Dental Practice Committee (GDPC) that I have known in the 30 or so years that I have reported about dentistry. I wish him well in what is a most demanding, time consuming and some would say impossible job. He has two new vice-chairmen, Dave Cottam and…
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Last week, whilst the profession and the dental press were busy listening to and digesting the General Dental Council’s appearance before the Health Committee, the Department of Health gave its judgement on general dental practitioners’ pay for the coming year. In case you missed this momentous news, here is the result: dental contracts will rise…
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Illegal teeth whitening seems to crop up almost every week through a press release from the General Dental Council (GDC) about its on-going pursuit of people illegally whitening. I shouldn’t complain really; it must be better for the GDC to pursue illegal whiteners, rather than legal (and often innocent) dentists who happen to have a complaint…
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Michael Watson discusses what needs to be done to improve the oral health of the nation’s children. Last week I attended a meeting of the Commons Health Committee, which was discussing the crisis in child oral health. One third of children in England suffer from tooth decay, which is the most common reason why five-nine-year-olds…
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And now for something completely different – to borrow a phrase from Monty Python. For a change this week I will write about politics, not in the narrow dental sense, as I do most weeks, but how things may pan out after 7 May, a subject that has been in the national media for some…
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The Government’s response to the Law Commission’s report on the regulation of health and social care professionals is neither an easy nor a light read. Both the response and the original report were drafted by lawyers after all. But hidden away in the 117 pages of the response are some golden nuggets of information. Early…
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A total of 30 million patients were seen in the 24-month period ending 31 December, 2014, which is an increase of 1.9 million on March 2006, when the new contract started. Expressed as a percentage of the population, this represents a small increase of 0.1% (55.7%) from the 2006 figure. Although the number of children…
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Fiona Sandom, who is president of the British Association of Dental Therapists (BADT), has drawn our attention to a new study suggesting dental hygienists and therapists should be used to screen for dental caries and periodontal disease. The report, with the rather forbidding title: The Efficacy of Screening for Common Dental Diseases by Hygiene-Therapists A…
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Last month Which? launched a campaign to ‘clean up dental costs’, with a lurid picture of a sweating patient being attacked by an ice-pick wielding dentist. So far it has attracted over 19,000 signatures. It calls on NHS England and regulators to make sure all dentists comply with existing rules and make information on prices…
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The General Dental Council (GDC) and NHS England will launch a pilot scheme, which will aim to ensure that concerns about a dentist’s NHS performance can be handled locally rather than going through fitness to practise procedures at the GDC. The aim is to focus GDC resources on cases ‘where patients are at risk and…
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What will dentists think of the prototype contracts announced last week? Those who wanted to see the back of the units of dental activity (UDAs) will be disappointed, as will those who wanted clarity about what dental treatments are or are not available under the NHS. As will those who wanted to return to item of…
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The long awaited proposals for dental contract prototypes have now been released by the Department of Health. It was at the British Dental Association conference in Manchester last April that health minister, Earl Howe, announced that such prototypes would be started to test the whole contract, rather than parts of it as the existing pilots…
