Part of 2. Questions to the Minister for Health and Social Services – in the Senedd at 3:00 pm on 3 November 2021.
Thanks very much. I'm pleased to say that we are making steady progress in terms of recovery of dental services, but it is difficult, because we're still only up to about 40 to 50 per cent of pre-pandemic levels, which is a very low number. There are good reasons for that, I'm afraid, and that is because, clearly, we need to put in place infection control measures. There needs to be physical distancing. There needs to be enhanced PPE. And clearly that means that fewer patients can be seen within each clinical session. Having said that, over 30,000 people are being seen each week, and what we're asking health boards to do now is to prioritise people who are perhaps in more urgent care. When it comes to recruitment, you're absolutely right there is a difficulty in terms of recruitment for dentists. We have looked at the study of Bangor University. One of the things that they are suggesting is that, actually, dental technicians, for example, can do a lot of the work that dentists are able to do, and we're looking at having a new form of contract to look at how we are going to change the way we provide dental services in Wales. The problem is that this is a difficult year to introduce that—that reset and recovery that we would like to see. But prudent healthcare, using a whole-team approach, so not necessarily using dentists all the time; making sure that we look at prevention—those are the kinds of things that we have in mind, that we've got a programme ready to run. It's just that it's very, very difficult to roll out that programme at this point in time in the pandemic.