Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, pursuant to the Answer of 7 November 2017 to Question 111157, on dental services, what assessment he has made of the satisfaction rates of low-income citizens for dental healthcare services in 2017.

NHS England does not collect satisfaction data differentiated by income, however the overall satisfaction rating for National Health Service dentistry is high with the vast majority of NHS patients surveyed indicating that they are satisfied with the service.

The GP Patient Survey, contains questions about satisfaction with NHS dentistry but does not ask about respondents income. The latest GP Patient Survey published in July showed that overall 85% of respondents had a positive experience of NHS dentistry.

NHS Digital has published an analysis of the GP Patient Survey information that breaks the responses down by deciles of deprivation. This is not strictly the same as low-income, and is using average deprivation across a geographic area as a proxy for the deprivation of respondents.

The attached document includes a table showing the percentage of people reporting a very good or fairly good experience of NHS Dental Services by 2015 deprivation decile for the period January 2017 to March 2017.