Dental Services

Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:04 pm on 26 November 2019.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 2:04, 26 November 2019

I thank the Member for that. I think it is important in recognising that there are genuine challenges in NHS dentistry in some parts of Wales, that we also recognise what has been achieved. There are 40,000 more people receiving NHS dental treatment in Wales today than there were five years ago. In 2014, we had 1,439 dentists working in the NHS in Wales. Today, we have over 1,500 dentists working in the NHS in Wales, and as I said in my original answer, the percentage of children accessing NHS dentistry in Wales is at an all-time high.

Now, there are parts of Wales where that is a bigger challenge. One of the reasons why it is a bigger challenge, thinking of Gareth Bennett's referral to the impact of Brexit on NHS staff, is exactly that: 30 per cent of NHS dental care in the United Kingdom is provided by EU nationals. Those people are not being recruited in the way they were because of the Brexit chill, and that has caused a particular impact on some of the big dental corporates in Wales, finding that they're not able to recruit dentists from overseas as they were once able to do. But, we are training dentists in Wales. We train every year an extra 75 to 80 dentists, but there is a challenge for the profession here as well. The reform of the contract should mean less time spent doing routine work that doesn't have a clinical benefit freeing up time to do more things that you need somebody with the skills of a dentist to do. And we need to see liberalisation of the profession. We have far too many dentists in Wales carrying out routine fillings and dental checks, which you just don't need somebody with a highly-trained capacity of a dentist to do. We need the dental profession to follow the primary care medical profession in Wales in liberalising the number of people and the types of professions able to provide NHS dentistry, and then, we will be able to use those scarce skills to full clinical impact and to provide a greater level of access to NHS dentistry.