Asked by: Selaine Saxby (Conservative - North Devon)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether her Department provides ringfenced funding for dentistry to the Devon integrated care board.
Answered by Andrea Leadsom - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
We are currently considering arrangements for 2024/25. NHS England provided guidance for the integrated care boards (ICBs) that required dental allocations to be ringfenced in 2023/24, with any unused resources to be re-directed to improve National Health Service dental access in the first instance, rather than being spent on other services. In November 2023, NHS England confirmed that where ICBs had not spent all of their allocation on improving access to dentistry, they would be able to retain any underspend, and use it to balance their bottom line and any other pressures. ICBs will decide how to use any forecast underspend in line with this guidance.
Asked by: Selaine Saxby (Conservative - North Devon)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment she has made of the potential merits of fluoridating the water supply in Devon.
Answered by Andrea Leadsom - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
No specific assessment has been made. The United Kingdom Chief Medical Officers in their joint statement in September 2021 concluded that on balance, there is strong scientific evidence that water fluoridation is an effective public health intervention for reducing the prevalence of tooth decay and improving dental health equality across the UK.
Asked by: Selaine Saxby (Conservative - North Devon)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps her Department is taking to ensure equal experiences of patients with (a) Chron's disease and (b) Ulcerative Colitis in the South West.
Answered by Andrew Stephenson - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
The Getting It Right First Time (GIRFT) national specialty report on gastroenterology was published in September 2021. Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) such as Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis is one of the conditions covered under gastroenterological services in the report. The report sets out actions and recommendations to improve patient care in gastroenterology. The aim is to reduce unwarranted variation in treatments and services in, which will ensure consistent care is provided to IBD patients across the country.
The GIRFT programme is now embedded within NHS England programmes to improve quality and productivity, so that best practice is adopted throughout the National Health Service. RightCare scenarios support local systems to identify where patient outcomes, quality of life and service costs can be improved as the result of shifting the care pathway from a suboptimal journey to an optimal one that consistently delivers timely, evidence-based excellence of care. Once published, a new IBD RightCare scenario will set out high-quality joined-up care at every point of the patient journey.
Asked by: Selaine Saxby (Conservative - North Devon)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps her Department is taking to help tackle the NHS dentistry backlog in North Devon constituency.
Answered by Andrea Leadsom - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
In the South-West, NHS England have commissioned additional urgent dental care appointments that people can access via NHS 111.
They have also implemented a new pathway called stabilisation dental care to support those who do not have access to a regular dentist but require non-urgent dental care.
Asked by: Selaine Saxby (Conservative - North Devon)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department will take to ensure equal access to paediatric interventional radiology services in the UK.
Answered by Helen Whately - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
The Department will discuss this with NHS England.
Asked by: Selaine Saxby (Conservative - North Devon)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to help increase the number of dental professionals who have qualified outside the EEA who practice in the UK.
Answered by James Morris
The Government is currently amending the General Dental Council’s (GDC) international registration legislation. This aims to provide greater flexibility for the GDC to improve its existing international registration process and introduce alternative routes to registration for international applicants, whilst maintaining its focus on robust public protection. We aim to introduce these amendments in autumn 2022, subject to Parliamentary approval.