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 improve access to NHS dental services in Houghton and Sunderland South constituency.

We are currently working on a plan for dentistry to improve access to dental care across England, including in Houghton and Sunderland South constituency. There are several fronts where we need to take further action to support and recover activity in National Health Service dentistry, to improve access to care for all ages.

Our dentistry recovery plan will build upon the first package of reforms agreed in July 2022, which included changes to banding and the introduction of a minimum Units of Dental Activity value. Our plan will include addressing how we continue to improve access, particularly for new patients, and how we make NHS work more attractive to ensure dentists are incentivised to deliver more NHS care.

It is now a legal requirement for dentists to update their information on the NHS website to improve the information available to patients. These regulations came into effect in November 2022. Patients who are struggling to find a local dentist can contact NHS England’s Customer Contact Centre for assistance or contact NHS 111 if seeking urgent care.

NHS England has recently provided guidance for integrated care boards (ICBs) that requires dental funding to be ringfenced, with any unused resources re-directed to improve NHS dental access in the first instance. This includes in Houghton and Sunderland South constituency.

Additional funding has been made available by ICBs to local practices, including in Houghton and Sunderland South constituency, which have the capacity to deliver additional clinical sessions outside of their normal opening hours. This is to provide treatment to patients with urgent dental care needs, as well as for the prioritisation of looked after children and unscheduled care patients with dental complaints and complex high care needs. This pilot scheme is in place until the end of March 2024.