The National Audit Office’s damning verdict on the former Government’s Dental Recovery Plan underlines the need for fundamental reform in NHS dentistry.
It appears the ambition of securing an additional 1.5m treatments by the end of 2024/25 will not be met – and even if the target was reached it would still be 2.6m fewer treatments per year than pre-pandemic levels.
The report states it is unclear how the final numbers in the plan were even arrived at. Former Minister Andrea Leadsom told the Health and Social Care Committee in March the modelling had “quite a high likelihood of not being reliable.”
Neither ‘Golden Hellos’ nor dental vans are on track to deliver anything resembling the volume of treatments they were estimated to deliver by March 2025. The report cites Ministerial disagreement on locations contributed to delays with the first dentist hired using a ‘Golden Hello’ payment in October. Not a single dental van has been procured to date. We argued at the time these vans represented very poor value for money for routine care.
Back in February we slammed this plan for failing to make a decisive break with the discredited NHS contract fuelling the access and workforce crisis in NHS dentistry. Minor tweaks to a broken system, based on recycling existing budgets, represent a failed model for reform the new Government must reject.
“We warned at the outset that this Recovery Plan was unworthy of the title,” said GDPC Chair Shawn Charlwood.
“Unfunded, unambitious policies failed to make a dent in a crisis hitting millions.
“A new Government must show it is willing to learn from its predecessor’s mistakes.”