Amanda Hack

“I thank the hon. Members for Yeovil (Adam Dance), for Waveney Valley (Adrian Ramsay) and for Farnham and Bordon (Gregory Stafford), and my hon. Friend the Member for Sunderland Central (Lewis Atkinson), for giving us this opportunity to discuss dentistry. This situation of access to dentistry is not new. From 2007 to 2014, I managed the Braunstone health and social care centre in the constituency of my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester West (Liz Kendall). The centre was designed to bring NHS organisations together, with space for a dentist and an optician. However, we were unsuccessful at attracting NHS dentists and opticians to work in the centre, so those spaces were repurposed for other NHS services. Flash forward to today: I have been working with Fiona Ellwood, a constituent and associate professor and director of dental education at the University of Lincoln, on how we tackle the NHS dentistry issue head-on. Fiona and I have been working together on a proposal to utilise the workforce we already have, which I shared with the Minister a few weeks ago; we would welcome a meeting with him to discuss this further. As of last month, there were just shy of 70,000 dental nurses and around 47,000 dentists in the UK, which I am pleased to see represents a workforce expansion of over 5% under this Government. However, despite seven distinct professional groups making up the dental team, dentists remain overstretched because patients are funnelled to them for almost everything—even cases that trained dental nurses, dental hygienists or dental therapists could safely handle. NHS data confirms that dental therapists and hygienists deliver just 5% of total service activity. That baseline has stagnated for years, trapping dentists under a mountain of work when the entire workforce, if utilised, could make systematic improvements to dental care. Just imagine the appointments that could be released if we just used the current workforce in a different way. The current situation is inefficient and expensive and is driving dentists out of the NHS, while 13 million people across the country are left with a completely unmet need for NHS dentistry. My constituency of North West Leicestershire already has the second lowest rate for units of dental activity in Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland. There were 14 contract terminations between February 2021 and July 2024, and one practice was terminated in Ashby in my constituency. We do not have a lack of talent; we have a failure of deployment. Dental therapists can do over 70% of routine primary care. Why do we not use the service that we have? We could realise clear benefits if the whole dentistry workforce was utilised according to skills and experience, rather than according to what a dentist can or cannot do. Dental nurses also have the greatest capacity to take on intervention and preventive work, and to work with flexibility and agility within community and neighbourhood settings. Many are already oral health practitioners in their own right. I am greatly pleased that a training centre in Lincolnshire offering courses in dental hygiene and therapy will open in 2026, accepting around 30 students in its first year. It will teach a new BSC in dental hygiene and therapy alongside a foundational course designed to help dental nurses and other healthcare professionals retrain and reskill. Members and the Minister will no doubt aware that the 2009 Steele review of NHS dentistry proposed a tiered model of care, matching patients to the right professionals at the right time, with prevention at its core. It was never fully realised, but maybe it is time to dust it off. A genuinely tiered NHS dental service would cut waiting lists, free up dentists to focus on complex care, and make better use of dental nurses and dental therapists, who are already trained and ready to do those jobs. Most importantly, it would shift the system towards prevention, not crisis management, which I note is a core priority of the Department.”