Health Services: Coronavirus

(asked on 22nd September 2020) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to ensure access to routine healthcare and dental treatment during a second wave of covid-19.


Answered by
Edward Argar Portrait
Edward Argar
Minister of State (Ministry of Justice)
This question was answered on 7th October 2020

At the height of the pandemic, NHS England and NHS Improvement set up urgent dental care centres (UDCs) to provide clinically necessary urgent treatment to patients. Over 600 UDCs remain open to ensure that dental treatment needed urgently can be accessed while practices make sure their own expansion of services is done as safely as possible. Routine face-to-face National Health Service dental services resumed from 8 June with the aim of increasing levels of service whilst taking into account infection control procedures and personal protective equipment requirements.

Our focus is on accelerating the return of all non-COVID-19 health services, including routine treatments, to near-normal levels, including making full use of available capacity between now and winter, whilst also preparing for winter demand pressures. This will be done alongside continued vigilance against further COVID-19 spikes locally and possibly nationally.

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