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 update the NHS Find a Dentist website with information on surgeries accepting new NHS patients.

The Department announced a package of improvements to the National Health Service dental system in July 2022 and detailed in ‘Our plan for patients’. These changes now make it legal requirement for dentists to update their information on the NHS website at least every 90 days to improve information available to patients. This will allow patients to find a dentist who can deliver the care they need and for the system to refer patients to practices with capacity. Compliance will be monitored on the number of dentists updating their availability quarterly through their NHS dental contracts.