Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether his Department has considered allowing dental therapists to expand their scope of practice and hold their own NHS contracts; and what assessment his Department has made of the potential impact of this on the ability of practices offer more services and reduce delays and waiting times.

Answered by Stephen Kinnock - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)

The 10-Year Health Plan for England and our recent Quality and Payment Reforms consultation outline the Government’s commitment to utilising the skills of the wider dental team to improve access to dental care. Amendments to the Human Medicines Regulations 2012 took effect in June 2024, to enable suitably trained and supported dental therapists to supply and administer specified medicines without requiring a Patient Group Direction or a Patient Specific Direction from a dentist.

We have no current plans to change the eligibility rules for holding National Health Service dental contracts. We are committed to reforming the dental contract, with a focus on matching resources to need, improving access, promoting prevention, and rewarding dentists fairly, while enabling the whole dental team, including dental therapists, to work to the top of their capability.

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether his department has considered replacing the routine six-monthly dental check-up with a system based on individual clinical need.

Answered by Stephen Kinnock - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)

Patients should be recalled based on their clinical need. The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) guidance on recall intervals states that a healthy adult with good oral health should see a dentist once every two years, and a child once every year.

On 16 December we published the Government’s response to the public consultation on improvements to the National Health Service dental contract. The changes will be introduced from April 2026. These reforms will put patients with greatest need first, incentivising urgent care and complex treatments, and will reduce clinically unnecessary check-ups.

Through the consultation, we sought feedback on alternative approaches or strategies that could best support practices to adhere to evidence-based recommendations on the time between routine examinations. The Government will consider further how best to implement the preferred options to support clinically appropriate check-ups that are also aligned to NICE guidance, noting that public education and the introduction of a risk assessment tool were the most popular options respondents to the consultation selected. The Government also intends to introduce ‘clinically appropriate patient recalls’ as the first topic of the quality improvement initiative, which was also proposed through the recent consultation. Further information is available from the following link:

https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/nhs-dentistry-contract-quality-and-payment-reforms/outcome/government-response-to-consultation-on-nhs-dentistry-contract-quality-and-payment-reforms

35th anniversary of the no fly zone in Iraqi Kurdistan

British forces on the front line in Afghanistan