Dental Services

(asked on 6th February 2024) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what recent assessment she has made of the efficacy of dental commissioning by Integrated Care Boards.


Answered by
Andrea Leadsom Portrait
Andrea Leadsom
Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
This question was answered on 19th February 2024

Following the delegation of its commissioning responsibilities to integrated care boards (ICB) from 1 April 2023, NHS England published the Operating Framework which sets out the accountabilities and responsibilities of NHS England and ICBs, and supports the requirements as laid out within the delegation agreement. This framework is intended to provide clarity on NHS England’s expectations on how ICBs will provide assurance to NHS England that they are exercising the delegated functions safely, effectively, and consistently within legislation regulations and statutory guidance. It will also set out the information that will be collected as part of the oversight of commissioning functions. This framework is available at the following link:

https://www.england.nhs.uk/publication/operating-framework/

NHS England encourages ICBs to reflect regularly on their compliance status, rather than just through annual self-declaration. Both formal and informal touchpoints will exist through ordinary business, and assurance discussions between NHS England regional teams and ICBs are woven into these meetings. To support both ICBs and regional colleagues, NHS England has published a Primary care commissioning assurance framework, which is available at the following link:

https://www.england.nhs.uk/publication/operating-framework/

In addition, Faster, simpler and fairer: our plan to recover and reform NHS dentistry, which was published on 7 February 2024, sets out a number of ways in which we will support ICBs to improve dental commissioning. For example, NHS England will work with ICBs in 2024/25 to identify opportunities to support contractors to deliver additional capacity beyond their existing contractual requirements, up to 110%, and to permanently and unilaterally amend contracts which have consistently under-delivered to ensure the Units of Dental Activity (UDAs) can be released and delivered by other contract holders instead. We have started to publish monthly data on local National Health Service dental activity at the ICB level, including the proportion of UDAs being delivered in different places. We will publish new workforce data early this year to support ICBs with their commissioning function, including employment and working trends. We will also consider publishing data on community dental services, which provide care to the most vulnerable patients, and we will explore opportunities to link to other community data sets and help join-up of local services.

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