COVID-19 inquiry ignores hardest hit and weakest recovering healthcare sector; dentistry
Mistakes made by the previous UK Government during the pandemic risk being repeated.
Mistakes made by the previous UK Government during the COVID-19 pandemic – that have left millions unable to access dentistry – risk being repeated, the British Dental Association (BDA) has warned.
In new evidence put to the UK Covid-19 Inquiry, analysis by the BDA shows that the pandemic had an impact on dentistry without parallel in healthcare, with the sharpest single fall in capacity and the weakest recovery.
The BDA said that dentistry was made an outlier, losing a third of all NHS capacity (33.3%) from 2020/21-2023/24, compared with 1.9% for outpatient care, 7% for Finished Consultant Episodes and 5.9% for A&E admissions. GPs have more than made up on lost patient contacts since lockdown, it said.
The BDA said the choices made by the former UK Government – on suspension and restoration of services and the recovery – left dentistry lagging behind other parts of healthcare. “This gulf has been sustained and eclipses even those parts of secondary care that have been subject to widespread industrial action,” said the BDA.
Data provided by the BDA regarding treatment backlog and access to NHS dentistry refers only to England, but the impact in Scotland was as significant. In February, the UK Government announced a recovery plan for dentistry in England. Last November, the Scottish Government introduced a reform of the system of payment for NHS dentistry in Scotland.
Just two references to dentistry have been made by the inquiry to date. The first is correspondence which states that dentistry is “not an important” part of the process for Module 3 of the inquiry, which covers the impact of the pandemic on healthcare systems. The second was simply to confirm the CV of Professor Jason Leitch, Scotland’s former National Clinical Director of Healthcare Quality and Strategy.
Eddie Crouch, the BDA’s Chair, said: “No part of the health service took such a hit during the pandemic, and none has seen such a limited recovery. Yet dentistry isn’t even on the menu at this Inquiry. At lockdown, dentistry was treated like an optional extra.
“Subsequent failure to deliver needed reform turbocharged existing problems into a genuinely existential threat to the service. The crisis millions now face is the result of political choices. If lessons are not learned we will see more collateral damage to core parts of our health service.”