In a previous post in 2023 I wrote about the growing crisis in NHS dentistry and Carl Walker followed up with an assessment of Labour plans to improve dentistry prior to the 2024 general election. But how are we getting on? How much closer are we to providing adequate NHS dental care the population in the UK?
Dental deserts remain. DIY dentistry remains. And longer-term issues are being stored up with a failure to train and retain sufficient dentists for the future. There are wider issues that need addressing to improve access to oral health care.
In 2022 the Local Government Association reported that there were a growing number of dental deserts across England with most notable gaps in provision in poorer and rural areas with higher levels of unmet need. The Office for National Statistics figures for 2024 showed that last year almost 97% of patients not already registered with an NHS dentist were unable to access NHS dental care. A BBC report from October 2024 found that only 1 in 4 dental surgeries in Scotland are in a position to offer NHS appointments and 6 Scottish council areas have no NHS appointments available for adults at all. in February 2025, a report in The Week stated that almost 2 in 3 children have untreated caries in the poorest areas of England with almost 1 in 4 children experiencing painful tooth decay. And yet the government’s NHS ‘Plan for Change’ does not include any specific targets or timelines for changes in dentistry.
In February this year the government re-pledged to provide 700,000 more NHS dental appointments as part of the Dentistry Rescue Plan included in their manifesto, but critics point out that this is nowhere near sufficient to meet current need. To put this into context, in 2023/24 approximately 34 million courses of dental treatment were delivered by the NHS in England, with 3.7 million of these recorded as urgent. The Department for Health and Social Care estimated in 2024 that the 700,000 appointments pledged would enable approximately 324,000 courses of treatment to be performed. With data suggesting many areas have no current access to NHS dentistry at all, this level of extra provision is likely to do little more than dent the surface.
The government also pledged to ‘flood dentistry deserts with new graduates’. This aligns with the Dental Schools Council’s report published this summer (June 2025) which highlighted an urgent need for increasing the workforce of dentists, dental nurses and dental hygiene therapist to meet the oral health needs of the population. Currently almost half of dentists practicing in the UK qualified abroad, and the current hostile political climate makes it likely that at least some of these desperately needed healthcare professionals will choose not to stay in the UK in the long term.
We need more dentists, dental nurses and dental hygiene therapists, along with more GPs and other healthcare professionals yet little is being done to scale up training. Young people are eager to study dentistry, but there are not enough places available to train them. UCAS figures from 2023 suggest that over 10,000 students applied for the 940 available places to study at UK dental schools in 2023. At the same time hygiene and therapy courses are being closed because they are not cost effective with hygiene and therapy students receiving 10 times less funding for their placements than dentistry students despite both providing active (free) treatment for NHS patients during their training. We have the potential students, we have the need, and the Dental Schools Council, representing dental schools across the country, are willing.
But we lack the funding, the political will, and, most importantly, the clinical academic workforce needed to provide the training. The number of clinical academics aged over 66 has almost tripled in the last 10 years with fewer clinicianschoosing to move into academia. Clinical academics are fundamental to training future dentists but currently make up only 2.5% of the dental workforce with numbers dropping because of retirement and decreasing numbers of people choosing the academic pathway once qualified.
This isn’t a new problem and it isn’t a problem unique to the UK. Oral health is in crisis across the globe and there is a lack of access to basic dental care in many low, middle and increasingly also in high income countries. Dentistry has experienced many decades of underfunding and failure to prioritise preventative care which was finally acknowledged with the publication of the Global strategy and action plan on oral health published by the WHO in May 2024. This is the first time the WHO has acknowledged the scale and impact of poor oral health on the global population and the report laid out the impact of this neglect.
If the government is serious about tackling poor oral health we need some radical solutions. We need the radical, progressive vision outlined by Carl Walker in his post last year, along with the funding to make that possible. We need to rethink the dental contract to make NHS work attractive for dentists (and other healthcare workers). But we also need some joined up thinking. We need more healthcare workers. Therefore, we need the universities, academics, NHS placements and wider workforce to train them. Decimating the university sector at a time when the NHS is on its knees makes the job of our desperately needed, over worked and short staffed, clinical academics, almost untenable. Alongside this we also need to make those who come to this country to provide care feel welcome and valued, and the politically expedient, anti-immigrant rhetoric currently abounding in our politics has to be challenged.
Finally we need a change in the way we think about the mouth and about oral health care. Too often the mouth is an after-thought and packages of care are put together to look after the mental and physical health (and possibly the social care needs) of patients without any consideration for their oral health. Putting the mouth back into the body would ensure that oral health needs are considered alongside all other health and care needs.
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Is the Dentistry Rescue Plan Toothless?
by Sasha Scambler Sep 10, 2025In a previous post in 2023 I wrote about the growing crisis in NHS dentistry and Carl Walker followed up with an assessment of Labour plans to improve dentistry prior to the 2024 general election. But how are we getting on? How much closer are we to providing adequate NHS dental care the population in the UK?
Dental deserts remain. DIY dentistry remains. And longer-term issues are being stored up with a failure to train and retain sufficient dentists for the future. There are wider issues that need addressing to improve access to oral health care.
In 2022 the Local Government Association reported that there were a growing number of dental deserts across England with most notable gaps in provision in poorer and rural areas with higher levels of unmet need. The Office for National Statistics figures for 2024 showed that last year almost 97% of patients not already registered with an NHS dentist were unable to access NHS dental care. A BBC report from October 2024 found that only 1 in 4 dental surgeries in Scotland are in a position to offer NHS appointments and 6 Scottish council areas have no NHS appointments available for adults at all. in February 2025, a report in The Week stated that almost 2 in 3 children have untreated caries in the poorest areas of England with almost 1 in 4 children experiencing painful tooth decay. And yet the government’s NHS ‘Plan for Change’ does not include any specific targets or timelines for changes in dentistry.
In February this year the government re-pledged to provide 700,000 more NHS dental appointments as part of the Dentistry Rescue Plan included in their manifesto, but critics point out that this is nowhere near sufficient to meet current need. To put this into context, in 2023/24 approximately 34 million courses of dental treatment were delivered by the NHS in England, with 3.7 million of these recorded as urgent. The Department for Health and Social Care estimated in 2024 that the 700,000 appointments pledged would enable approximately 324,000 courses of treatment to be performed. With data suggesting many areas have no current access to NHS dentistry at all, this level of extra provision is likely to do little more than dent the surface.
The government also pledged to ‘flood dentistry deserts with new graduates’. This aligns with the Dental Schools Council’s report published this summer (June 2025) which highlighted an urgent need for increasing the workforce of dentists, dental nurses and dental hygiene therapist to meet the oral health needs of the population. Currently almost half of dentists practicing in the UK qualified abroad, and the current hostile political climate makes it likely that at least some of these desperately needed healthcare professionals will choose not to stay in the UK in the long term.
We need more dentists, dental nurses and dental hygiene therapists, along with more GPs and other healthcare professionals yet little is being done to scale up training. Young people are eager to study dentistry, but there are not enough places available to train them. UCAS figures from 2023 suggest that over 10,000 students applied for the 940 available places to study at UK dental schools in 2023. At the same time hygiene and therapy courses are being closed because they are not cost effective with hygiene and therapy students receiving 10 times less funding for their placements than dentistry students despite both providing active (free) treatment for NHS patients during their training. We have the potential students, we have the need, and the Dental Schools Council, representing dental schools across the country, are willing.
But we lack the funding, the political will, and, most importantly, the clinical academic workforce needed to provide the training. The number of clinical academics aged over 66 has almost tripled in the last 10 years with fewer clinicianschoosing to move into academia. Clinical academics are fundamental to training future dentists but currently make up only 2.5% of the dental workforce with numbers dropping because of retirement and decreasing numbers of people choosing the academic pathway once qualified.
This isn’t a new problem and it isn’t a problem unique to the UK. Oral health is in crisis across the globe and there is a lack of access to basic dental care in many low, middle and increasingly also in high income countries. Dentistry has experienced many decades of underfunding and failure to prioritise preventative care which was finally acknowledged with the publication of the Global strategy and action plan on oral health published by the WHO in May 2024. This is the first time the WHO has acknowledged the scale and impact of poor oral health on the global population and the report laid out the impact of this neglect.
If the government is serious about tackling poor oral health we need some radical solutions. We need the radical, progressive vision outlined by Carl Walker in his post last year, along with the funding to make that possible. We need to rethink the dental contract to make NHS work attractive for dentists (and other healthcare workers). But we also need some joined up thinking. We need more healthcare workers. Therefore, we need the universities, academics, NHS placements and wider workforce to train them. Decimating the university sector at a time when the NHS is on its knees makes the job of our desperately needed, over worked and short staffed, clinical academics, almost untenable. Alongside this we also need to make those who come to this country to provide care feel welcome and valued, and the politically expedient, anti-immigrant rhetoric currently abounding in our politics has to be challenged.
Finally we need a change in the way we think about the mouth and about oral health care. Too often the mouth is an after-thought and packages of care are put together to look after the mental and physical health (and possibly the social care needs) of patients without any consideration for their oral health. Putting the mouth back into the body would ensure that oral health needs are considered alongside all other health and care needs.