Part of 2. Questions to the Minister for Health and Social Services – in the Senedd at 2:53 pm on 15 June 2022.
Thanks, Jane, and thanks for your continued focus on this issue. It's certainly keeping my feet to the fire. I'm pleased to say that this new contract will, as I say, hopefully see 5,000 additional people who currently can't get access to NHS dentists in Powys getting access, and 13,000 people in the Hywel Dda area.
So, we have put money on the table, but, as you note, money is not going to fix this alone. We put £2 million on the table last year and there's recurrent funding of £2 million, but, actually, what we're seeing is that dentists just don't want to pick it up, they don't want to play. And so, you're absolutely right that what we need to do is to think around new ways of doing things, and that's why we are very focused on using dental therapists in the way that you suggest. This is certainly something that I've raised with all of the health boards in my annual appraisals with them—something that I raised just this week with the chair of the Powys health board. Certainly, one of the things that we are seeing, for example, is an increase of 74 places in the foundation training of dental places. So, things are improving, but what I'm trying to do is to see if we can push a lot further on those people who are able to do a lot of the work that dentists have been doing in the past.