Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether she has made a recent assessment of the potential relationship between oral cancer detection rates and the availability of dentists.

Every dental check-up constitutes as an oral cancer screening. The NHS Dental statistics for England, 2022-23, Annual report highlights that 1.8 million adults were seen by a National Health Service dentist in the 24 months up to 30 June 2023, with 24,151 dentists performing NHS activity during 2022/23.

NHS England’s comprehensive Early Diagnosis strategy is based on six core strands of activity, from raising awareness of cancer symptoms and encouraging people to come forward, to implementing targeted interventions for particular cancer types that we know have previously experienced later stages of diagnosis, including oral cancers.

We encourage people to get in touch with their general practitioner if they notice or are worried about symptoms that could be cancer. NHS England is running the ‘Help Us, Help You’ (HUHY) campaign, which seeks to address the barriers that are deterring patients from accessing the NHS. The current HUHY campaign is focused on addressing fear of cancer as a barrier to presentation across all cancer types.