6. Will the Minister make a statement on the accessibility of NHS dentists in Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire? OQ57114

We continue to implement a safe, phased re-establishment of NHS dental services in the face of the pandemic. Practices are prioritising care according to need and are treating urgent cases and people who are experiencing problems first. In addition, measures are in place for dental practices providing NHS care to see new patients each week.

Thank you, Minister. Access to NHS dentistry has been a perennial problem, and the last 18 months has only exacerbated the problem due to COVID. Like many colleagues, it is an issue that I receive a regular amount of casework on, and it is an issue that causes a great deal of frustration and concern for many of my constituents. Like everything, to better understand how to tackle a problem, we need to have a greater understanding of it. Therefore, I was concerned to learn that the Welsh Government have no current method of ascertaining exactly how many people require dentistry treatment. Without this detailed information as to what type of appointments are needed, it is very difficult to make provisions to adequately address this problem. Will you set out what actions your Government are taking to better map the needs of dental patients throughout Wales, and what provisions do you have in place to recruit more dentists? Diolch.

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.