Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many calls NHS 111 received about dental (a) pain and (b) other problems in each of the last five years.

The attached table shows the number of calls received by NHS 111 for patients with dental symptoms for each year from 2019/20 to 2023/24, broken into symptom groups, as well as the yearly and sum total of calls for patients with dental symptoms.

It is not possible to tell from this table how many calls the National Health Service received specifically about dental pain, but in the last five years there have been just under 4.8 million calls to NHS 111 resulting in a disposition of dental symptoms. The majority of these calls, four million, were regarding toothache without a dental injury.