Members will be aware that I have been asking questions about the dental situation in my constituency of Arfon on a number of occasions, and it is a very grave situation indeed. There are six practitioners in the constituency, but none of them are taking NHS patients. They’re not taking adults on the NHS, they’re not taking children on the NHS and they’re not taking children and young people with disabilities on the NHS, either. So, many of them have to go out of the area to seek dental treatment on the NHS—as far as Dolgellau in some cases, which is an hour and a quarter away in a car, and takes even longer, of course, on a bus.

What that means on a practical level very often is that the patients wait until things have gone to an extreme, and have to go to an emergency clinic through NHS Direct once the problem has worsened. And then, that clinic, very often, is at least half an hour away in a car from people’s homes in Arfon. Or, if they can’t get to the clinic, what happens next is that they turn up at Ysbyty Gwynedd with serious problems. Anecdotally, I hear regular stories about such situations; it’s increasing in how often it happens. Therefore, the relatively cheap preventative work simply isn’t happening, and what happens is that it becomes an acute emergency case, which, of course, is very expensive. What’s very frustrating for dental practitioners in Arfon is that they do have capacity; they have the time to see patients. Half of them do accept private patients, so they have the resources, but they can’t take new NHS patients because the contract places a cap on the number of NHS patients that they can accept. They won’t be paid if they go beyond that limit.

The situation hasn’t changed in the past two years. It's wrong to say that the picture I'm painting today is a snapshot, as has been claimed when I have raised this issue previously. The situation is very similar to what it was two years ago. So, I am extremely disappointed that there will be no additional funding and I’m exceptionally disappointed that the move towards better contracts for dentistry on the NHS—that that movement is so slow. That’s what the practitioners are telling me in Arfon, too. Therefore, the situation facing new patients and children in my area will continue, despite the best efforts of the committee and this one-day inquiry that you’ve held. It appears that you’ve been wasting your time, because the Government doesn’t intend to do anything that’s hugely different to what they’re doing at the moment, and the dental crisis will continue.

I am pleased to hear that there is to be an evaluation of recruitment and retention among dentists, and I look forward to seeing the conclusions of that. I would like to ask today whether you will be looking specifically at a shortage of dentists in north Wales and whether there is a case for training dentists in north Wales, in Bangor, exactly as has happened with doctors. Because the arguments are the same: if you train people in a particular area, they do tend to remain in that area, and in that way, they do fill in those gaps that exist in many areas across north Wales. So, I’m sure you will have heard me making the case about doctors. Well, I think the same arguments can be made about dentists too. Thank you.