Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if she will make an assessment of the potential implications for her Department’s polices of recent trends in levels of (a) children, (b) women and (c) people unable to access NHS dental services in Kingswood constituency.

Answered by Andrea Leadsom - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)

Our Dentistry Recovery Plan, backed by £200 million, will make dental services faster, simpler, and fairer for National Health Service dental patients. It will fund approximately 2.5 million additional appointments, or more than 1.5 million additional courses of dental treatment. A New Patient Premium is supporting dentists to take on new patients and since the end of January, nearly 500 more practices have said they are open to new patients.

The Dentistry Recovery plan also sets out a new emphasis on prevention and good oral health in children. This includes supporting nurseries and early years settings to incorporate good oral hygiene into daily routines, and providing advice to expectant parents on how to protect their baby’s teeth. The plan will deploy mobile dental teams into schools to provide advice and deliver preventative treatments to more than 165,000 children.

A new patient premium is supporting dentists to take on new patients, and a new marketing campaign will help everyone who needs an NHS dentist in finding one. We have further supported dentists by raising the minimum Units of Dental Activity rate to £28 this year, making NHS work more attractive and sustainable. We are committed to evaluating the impacts of the measures included in our plan, and we will publish monthly data on progress, once available. Annual dental statistics, including the number of adults and children who have seen an NHS dentist since 2015, are available at the following link:

https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and information/publications/statistical/nhs-dental-statistics#past-publications

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if she will make an estimate of the number of (a) children, (b) women and (c) people affected by dental surgeries no longer providing NHS services in Kingswood constituency since 2022.

Answered by Andrea Leadsom - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)

Our Dentistry Recovery Plan, backed by £200 million, will make dental services faster, simpler, and fairer for National Health Service dental patients across England. It will fund approximately 2.5 million additional appointments, or more than 1.5 million additional courses of dental treatment. Patients unable to access an urgent dental appointment directly through an NHS dental practice are advised to contact NHS 111 for assistance.

We are committed to evaluating the impacts of the measures included in our plan, and we will publish monthly data on progress once available. No estimates are currently available of the number of children, women, and people affected by dental surgeries no longer providing NHS services in the Kingswood constituency since 2022. Annual dental statistics, including the number of dentists offering NHS services since 2015, are available at the following link:

https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/publications/statistical/nhs-dental-statistics

Annual data on the number of NHS dental contracts commissioned since 2015/16 is available at the following link:

https://www.nhsbsa.nhs.uk/dental-data/nhs-payments-dentists