Spare NHS Capacity Available, Dental Chain Claims

Thu, 09 Oct 2008

A leading UK dental chain claims that it can help reduce long NHS waiting lists as it currently has spare capacity to tend to NHS patients .

Oasis Dental Care has revealed that 7,095 NHS appointment slots were made available across its 150 UK practices last month and claims there are around 7,500 spare places going this month.

Alarming figures released by the NHS Information Centre in August suggest that one million fewer people have been seen by an NHS dentist since the introduction of the April 2006 contract .

The data also shows that 30.8 per cent of children and 51.1 per cent of adults in England have gone two years without seeing an NHS dentist .

But Oasis claims it has had NHS places to offer since the end of August and is currently running an advertising campaign to fill NHS appointments in areas where they have spare capacity.

The campaign will involve queues of people at cash machines and post offices wearing T-shirts bearing the slogan ‘To see an NHS dentists, call Oasis'.

Oasis chief executive Justin Ash stressed the spare capacity "is not a blip", but "part of a consistent pattern".

"We've invested heavily in new NHS capacity, including opening 24 new HNS practices in the last two years, but it seems that people are assuming there is no NHS capacity locally and so don't even try to search it out," he explained.

"Many people believe they have to be on a dentist's list in order to get NHS treatment but there is no such things as an NHS list these days, although the perception persists. That may partly explain why fewer people are using the NHS ."
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