Eoin Williams, Camden and Haringey Socialist Party
Almost since its inception, dental care provided by the NHS has been under threat. Only one year after the creation of the NHS in 1948, the then Labour government introduced fees for dental prescriptions. Later in 1951,charges for dentures were introduced. This trend of slowly privatising NHS dental care has continued until today where, under a new Labour government, British dentistry is at its closest to breaking point in history.
Caps on NHS charges are insufficient to cover costs of contemporary dental care, with NHS dentists losing, on average, £42.60 every time they fix dentures. Such shortfalls force dentists to subsidise NHS work with funds from private treatments, up to £332 million a year. “This service is running on empty, kept afloat by private work and goodwill, which is now in very short supply” said Shiv Pabary, chair of the British Dental Association’s general dental practice committee.
Many dentists, frustrated at insufficient funding, are going private. Consequently, there is a substantial shortage of NHS dentists, producing what have been dubbed ‘dental deserts’. These are large areas without an NHS dentist and illustrate the increasing difficulty in accessing affordable dental care.
To solve the dental health crisis we need to fully nationalise the NHS and all its services. This includes providing all NHS dentists with the full funding required to treat NHS patients and for dental procedures to be free at the point of use.
Labour health secretary Wes Streeting has pledged 700,000 extra NHS appointments per year, with more involvement from private health vultures. While wedded to the markets’ ‘fiscal responsibility’ and leaving the wealth of the bosses untouched, the prescription from the new Labour government won’t fill the cavities of the dental system. A new mass workers’ party, armed with a socialist programme, would kick out private profit from our health system and bring dentistry under a democratically planned and fully resourced health service.
