NHS dentistry



Reforms to NHS dentistry are failing, the British Dental Association said yesterday as thousands of would-be patients besieged a practice near Portsmouth offering NHS care. In scenes more typical of the January sales, patients arrived at first light at a new practice in Titchfield Common, Hampshire. Before the doors had opened, 2,000 people had registered online and over the phone. Hundreds more arrived in an attempt to grab the 1,000 remaining places. By the time the surgery opened at 10am, the queue stretched around the block. Manori Ambrose, who set up the surgery, said: “There are a lot of people who need a dentist who are not even on the waiting list.”

The British Dental Association (BDA) wrote to Barry Cockroft, the Chief Dental Officer of England, yesterday and called for changes to the dental contract, which has been in force for a year. The letter, from Lester Ellman, chairman of the BDA general dental practice committee, said: “The strength of the evidence means I must now write to you to urge you to reconsider the current dental contract. Our concerns go beyond the significant transitional difficulties experienced over the past year and we can now demonstrate that the new system is in need of fundamental reform.”

He called for three key changes: the abandonment of units of dental activity as the only way of measuring performance; more money to be paid directly to primary care trusts for dental services; and for dentists to be given the option to transfer their NHS contracts to new owners. Dr Ellman called on the Government to look again at an alternative model, called personal dental services, which was piloted over a seven-year period.

Near the front of the queue in Titchfield Common was Chris Rills, 49, who said: “I have been without an NHS dentist for three years.”

Last year the Government introduced a new contract to attract dentists back to the NHS. It claims that the move is succeeding, but a BDA survey has found that 85 per cent of dentists thought that it had not improved access to NHS care.

An NHS dentist took her own life after succumbing to the pressures of work, an inquest in Pickering was told. Ingrid Gill, 46, of Thornton Dale, North Yorkshire, took an overdose of antidepressants and whisky after taking on a huge list as the only NHS dentist at the practice, and then being asked by one of the owners to resign from the NHS list because of ill health. She also later had breast cancer diagnosed. Verdict: suicide.

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Creeping privatization of government healthcare in Australia's oldest "free" hospital system

It's a process already well underway in Britain

AROUND 10,000 Queensland public hospital patients waiting for elective surgery will now be able to access private health care as the government throws its waiting lists open to tender. Health Minister Stephen Robertson today confirmed a Courier-Mail report that the state was spending $8.5 million to have the patients treated sooner in the private sector through a brokerage service. "Queenslanders who have been identified as waiting too long for their elective surgery will be offered to this brokerage service, who will then go around private hospitals to see who is prepared to take that patient," Mr Robertson told ABC radio today. "They will obviously be paid for taking that particular patient. "That means we will be able to make some real inroads into those numbers of Queenslanders who are waiting outside of the time that it is clinically appropriate for them to be seen for their elective surgery."

Mr Robertson said about 160 of the most urgent category one patients were waiting longer than 30 days. There were between 3,000 and 3,300 patients rated as category two and around 6,000 to 6,600 in the least urgent category three. The service, called Surgery Connect, will target elective surgery for procedures such as hip and knee replacements, hysterectomies and corrective eye surgery. Mr Robertson said private sector doctors already performed elective surgery at the federal government's Department of Veteran Affairs (DVA) rate of payment and there was no reason why they should not do the same surgery on public hospital patients for the same money. Private hospitals had also said they were willing to take the patients.

"Not all private hospitals are working flat out and from my meetings with them, they tell me on a regular basis they would be keen to see more public patients come through their doors, so this is us testing that market," Mr Robertson said.

But AMA Queensland (AMAQ) president-elect Ross Cartmill said morale in the public hospital system would suffer under the new system. "We feel very strongly that it's the doctors working in the public sector who should be doing any of the surgery," Dr Cartmill said. "Secondly, we've made it very clear that they are training the trainees - the doctors of tomorrow. "If you want to undermine the morale of the public hospital system, that's the way to do it."

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL hospitals and health insurance schemes should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the very poor and minimal regulation. Both Australia and Sweden have large private sector health systems with government reimbursement for privately-provided services so can a purely private system with some level of government reimbursement or insurance for the poor be so hard to do?

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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