‘Derisory’ pay offer leaves Tyrone’s NHS dental services facing crisis

THE British Dental Association (BDA) Northern Ireland has said the future of NHS dental care in the North is “deeply uncertain”, and requires urgent reform if it is be saved from collapse.

However, following the Department of Health’s ‘totally inadequate’ financial proposal to rescue services, local dentists and patients are dubious whether the necessary system-saving reform will ever come.

BDA NI say years of underinvestment from the Department of Health (DoH) manifesting as ‘real term pay cuts’ for dentists who treat NHS patients, has eroded the system, leaving it teetering on the edge of ruin.

As the price of materials and utilities have risen over the last decade, in the same time, NHS dental care fees have fallen by as much as a quarter in real terms, meaning it is not uncommon for dentists treating NHS patients to incur costs rather than profit.

As a result, some dentists are growing increasingly reliant on private revenue to prop up the NHS side of their practices, while others are moving away from NHS work altogether.

So, recently, in a desperate effort to salvage the crumbling system, the BDA implored DoH, for the sake of the patients who rely on NHS dental care, to increase fees to “enable practices under financial pressure to start to rebuild the service”.

However, a few days later, a system already buckling at the knees was dealt another hard blow when DoH offered them a “totally inadequate” set of new funding arrangements.

Responding to the proposal, BDA said, “Any hopes that the extra costs in dental practice had been grasped by the Minister and his officials… have been left completely shattered.

They continued, “We were left bitterly disappointed when an initial offer of a 35 per-cent enhancement in fees was subsequently downgraded to 25 per-cent, and this despite papers from BDA outlining the crisis the sector is in, including a 40 per-cent reduction in dental earnings since 2008, costs soaring, and the continued impact of the pandemic.”

“Practitioners have been left deeply disappointed by the DoH’s decision, and worried for the future of the service, particularly those practitioners who are most NHS committed.”

Ciara Gallagher, chair of the Northern Ireland Dental Practice Committee (NIDPC) said, “Health Service dentistry simply cannot continue on this downward trajectory, where what is paid bears no correlation with the actual costs to deliver the service. The latest DoH offer simply does nothing to address those real costs of delivering dental care, or provide anything by way of future certainty.

“Practitioners have had enough. Unless this is remedied, we are likely to face a possible exodus of dentists away from health service dentistry.”