Stop the rot - why millions of Brits cannot afford to see a dentist

By Jayne Warren - 23/01/2008

Inject drugs, be an alcoholic, get beaten up in a fight, become obese, and you can be fixed on the NHS - but have a problem with your teeth and you're on your own. Grim news for those with inherited bad teeth -  and especially bad news for the elderly.

The irony is that, while some seven million Brits have not seen a dentist for two years because they can't afford to - our obsession with physical perfection means that bad teeth are regarded as unacceptable in public and a sign of bad character. Presenters everywhere have straight white gnashers, and even our prime Minister is rumoured to have had a bit of the old cosmetic dentistry before being put in the public firing line.

A recent survey by Mori for the Citizens Advice Bureau found that 34% of people in England and Wales have not visited a dentist since April 2006, and of the 66% who had been to the dentist, 64% had been to an NHS practice and 31% had paid for private care. The findings suggested that 7.4 million people had tried and failed to see an NHS dentist, with about 4.7 million seeking private care instead - and 2.7 million going without treatment altogether.

So it is just in the nick of time that the Government has pledged an 11% increase in Government funding for NHS dentistry from this year. Health Minister Ann Keen said: "We are working hard to improve access to NHS dentists and the Government remains fully committed to expanding services." But the 11% isn't averting the crisis of British bad teeth, and the emergence of a great dental divide between those who can afford the fees, and those who can't having worse teeth than ever before.

And bad teeth can have far-reaching repercussions, from being rejected for jobs and being unable to form relationships to increasing the risks for mouth cancer and pancreatic cancer in men. And older people face even worse problems if toothache and gum disease mean they can't eat properly.

The fact is that NHS dentistry has been slowly but surely decimated by both Labour and the Tories before them, and now relatively few people can afford to see a dentist for anything other than a real need - meaning pain. Gone are the regular six-month checkups enjoyed by many a baby-boomer - in fact the Mori poll showed that more than one in three children NEVER see an NHS dentist.

And even more alarming is the fact that desperate people are now taking out their own teeth with pliers - remember the man in Wiltshire? But he wasn't alone - more than one in twenty people reported the same form of DIY dentistry.

The irony of course, is that dentists in the UK are trained at a cost of £175,000 by the NHS (funded by us, remember), so logically they should be required to work within the NHS for a specified number of years.  And on top of that, the cost of a filling on the NHS has gone up from £14 to £43 in the past few years, and the NHS budget has doubled in the past decade - while dentistry has lowly rotted away.

But where is the incentive for British dentists since the introduction of the government's new contract in 2006, where they were paid a fixed fee to complete a fixed number of 'units' of NHS dental activity a year? Because they now receive the same amount of money for six fillings as for one, why take on complex cases? It's sobering to realise that in 1990% of dentists' income came from private patients - and now it's 58%.

What ever happened to the phrase 'a stitch in time saves nine'? For millions, it's teeth, not stitches, that won't be saved ...