Following damning evidence we gave last year, the London Assembly’s Committee has now issued a challenge to Mayor of London Sadiq Khan to lobby the Government to start the process of NHS dental contract reform as a matter of urgency.
In the report ‘Decay and delay: The state of dentistry and oral health in London’, the Committee follows our calls to urge government to provide funding for local authorities to expand the provision of supervised brushing in primary schools in London, and to review the feasibility study of fluoridating London’s water supply.
The committee found that some 25.8 per cent of five-year-olds in London experienced tooth decay in 2021-22, slightly higher than the English average of 23.7 per cent. In the year that followed, more than 5,000 children aged 0 to 9 in London were admitted to hospital for tooth extractions. Looking at the two years to March 2024, just 39 per cent of the capital’s adults accessed an NHS dentist.
The Chair of the London Assembly Health Committee Krupesh Hirani AM said: “We have heard time and time again, from organisations such as the BDA that the currently system is flawed and broken.”
At an evidence session last year, Young Dentist Committee Chair Natalie Bradley said: “We are increasingly seeing more people attending A&E who if were treated more upstream, would not have ended up there. We’ve had to employ a full-time dentist within our department to see to the people who are due to have cardiac surgery in hospital, who can’t have that surgery until they have had a dental check…Pan-country this is an NHS access crisis, but in London there is a crisis also.”
BDA spokesperson Chris Groombridge also gave evidence and highlighted the importance of supervised brushing, saying, “It’s about a building block for life…it’s about healthy habits”. London has already gone further and faster on policies like free school meals. We are looking to the Mayor to do the same when it comes to dentistry. To use direct powers on areas like supervised brushing, and influence on key areas like the contract.
We are continuing to put pressure on government to pick up the pace on contract reform. We’ve sent a message from over 250,000 supporters to the Prime Minister telling him quite simply: real reform won’t wait.