Norwich dental practice
A shocking story on the BBC News website this month revealed that a Norwich dental practice which has 200 spaces for new NHS patients received over 16,000 applications in just one day.
I say it was shocking but, in truth, it was not surprising. East Anglia is an NHS dental desert, the worst dental desert in the country, where 99.7 percent of people are unable to find an NHS dentist. Official figures show that for new patients, NHS dentistry has effectively ceased to exist.
Around one in five patients suffer in pain. There are even reports of people resorting to pulling out their own teeth because they cannot find an NHS dentist and cannot afford to pay for a private one.
It sounds Dickensian. Yet we are living in the 21st century.
I know from my parliamentary email inbox that this is a high priority for my constituents. So when I had the opportunity to question the Prime Minister directly about it, I asked him when the Government would start the critical negotiations to reform the dental contract, which is at the heart of the problem. Dentists are not being paid appropriately for the work they do, so too many of them are quitting the NHS and treating only private patients.
I’m glad that Sir Keir Starmer acknowledged that we face a crisis and one the Government is determined to put right. I’m glad too that the Prime Minister said the Government would work on a cross-party basis to address the issue. But he wouldn’t commit to starting negotiations before the end of this year and patients are tired of waiting.
The health minister is promising a rescue plan to restore NHS dentistry with 700,000 additional urgent appointments in areas of the country most in need “as soon as possible”. Those appointments can’t come soon enough.
If access to NHS dentistry was the only problem facing health care, it would be bad enough. But it isn’t. There is a critical lack of hospital services in the constituency with some people living 20 miles or more from their nearest big hospital. There is also a lack of post-operative care following eye surgeries such as cataracts which is having an knock-on effect on local A&E services.
Soon after being elected in July, I met with the Hartismere Hospital League of Friends to talk about how the hospital might provide a wider range of services for local residents so people didn’t have to travel to Norwich, Bury St Edmunds or Ipswich for treatment.
As you will now, the hospital closed to in-patients in 2006 but, thanks to a campaign by local residents, it was kept open as a health and care centre for treatments like podiatry, physiotherapy, mental health care and rheumatology.
If its facilities were upgraded, it could provide so much more. Installing an X-ray machine would make a huge difference to local residents in both Norfolk and Suffolk.
As well as dentistry and hospital services, there is a third area vital to healthcare where our area is badly served. We don’t have enough pharmacies. In the last year, nearly six pharmacies a week have shut their doors. One of them was a Boots pharmacy which closed in Bungay earlier this year. Others are reducing their hours. The loss of pharmacies has an outsized impact on rural areas where there is often no nearby alternative.
The NHS Norfolk and Waveney integrated care board, which covers most of Waveney Valley, said it had seen the highest number of hours lost per pharmacy.
So while I welcome the Health Secretary’s promise to turn the NHS into “a neighbourhood health service”, shifting care from hospitals to the community, the proof of the pudding will be in the eating.
There is a huge amount of catching-up to do and it was alarming to see the Government back itself into a corner over its fiscal rules which just seemed to promise an extension of the austerity which has caused such damage to our public services over the past 14 years.
So at the Budget at the end of this month, I hope the Chancellor will look at all options for increasing funding to the NHS, including being willing to call on the very richest in society to pay a little more in tax, in a way that could enable us to get the funding across all NHS services – dentistry, hospital care, GP surgeries and pharmacies – that is needed to keep pace with demand.
