Richard Hellen

Patients already pay a huge chunk towards their NHS dental care when they pay the patient charges set by the government. In some cases the patient pays more for the treatment than the government actually pay the dental practice. Unfortunately neither amount actually makes a dent into how much it actually costs the practice to provide that treatment. All dental practices are private businesses. The NHS contracts our services and our practices but the contract is grossly unfair & the unfairness has become worse & worse over the years. Advancements in the technology & equipment & materials we use now, & the (entirely reasonable) expectation of patients to actually fill & save their teeth (rather than pull them all & have dentures), means that the contracts & funding fall woefully short & practices often have to use the money they make from private dentistry to subsidise the cost of providing NHS care. What other profession would consistently pay for the cost of the patient’s care out of their own pockets? How sustainable is that as a business model? We have a responsibility to our patient cohort to remain a viable business who can keep up with regulations and afford to be able to use a good standard of materials and purchase and maintain safe and up to date equipment. If we don’t make money we can’t do that. The government have abused goodwill & professionalism of a large section of the profession for too long & now we are seeing the disaster they have created. It’s easy for governments to blame dentists; dental phobia makes us obvious hate figures The vast majority of us want to charge appropriately for our skills & time (as would any other professional; solicitor, architect, accountant etc) so that we can pay our highly & uniquely skilled team, invest in our practices for the good of our patient base & actually (heaven forbid) make some money at the end of it. I’m hearing all too often of practice owners not being able to pay themselves. NHS practice owners have seen, on average, approximately a 50% reduction in pay since I qualified in 2009. Any other sector would be marching in the streets! We’ve kept working, caring for our patients, trying to make it work in ever more difficult circumstances. Those who haven’t been able to make it work (as each practice set up is different for a whole host of reasons) have had to resign or reduce their NHS contracts or risk going bust. We’ve seen even dental corporations go bust or have to close practices entirely due to this chronic erosion of funding. If they can’t make it work what hope do us independent small business owners have? We are ever on a knife edge and the pressure is tremendous. We are called “greedy” or “thieving” or “disgusting” or “disgraceful” We are just people who are trying to do the best we can for our patients, our staff and our families. The pressure is sadly too much for many of my colleagues & our profession is at a much higher than average risk of suicide. For most of us there is a physical price to pay as we are all too often left with severe physical repercussions for providing the care we do, day after day, in the form of back/shoulder/hand injury, ruined hearing (from the drill noise) the list goes on. I understand the frustration of the public. Dentistry for health is something which the government promises to provide for all who really need it. Unfortunately we need some honesty about what they actually are willing to provide. The U.K. spends the smallest proportion of its healthcare budget of any Europe