I am delighted to serve under your guidance, Ms Bardell. I congratulate the hon. Member for Bedford (Mohammad Yasin) on obtaining this debate. His speech was a barrage of negativity, and it is not all negativity in this field. I am a practising dentist—part-time at the moment; very little. I am a member of the British Academy for Cosmetic Dentistry, the British Fluoridation Society and the British Endodontic Society. That is wet-finger dentistry, though in a glove.
For decades, the dental profession, especially NHS dentists, has felt that dentistry as a health service has, as far as the Department is concerned, been seen as a Cinderella service, or an expensive minefield, or both. This has gone on for decades under Governments of various and even mixed complexions. However, I believe this has markedly improved with my hon. Friend the Minister and the current chief dental officer. There has been a visible change of attitude. Both ladies recognise the importance of improving the oral health of the nation and of the status of dentistry as a health service. To use the chief dental officer’s banner statement, at last
“Putting the mouth back in the body”.
Covid has had a dramatic effect on the ability to provide dental services, whether NHS or private. Waiting lists for all dental patients have dramatically exacerbated, and we have just heard a tirade on this. Covid meant that for a period all dental surgeries were closed. Only emergency services and specialised clinics were open. When the surgeries were permitted to start resuming covid protection, actions such as furloughed time, PPE and so on added to the delays, complications and diminished throughput. Clinical teaching of final year students was diminished, such that there is doubt that some of them are ready to graduate.
All the dental team should have been double vaccinated by now, whether private, mixed practices or NHS. The R factor is going down. An increasing proportion of patients have been vaccinated. Dentists are following a careful triage system. Deaths are down, hospitalisations are down and the 21 June release is still on, we hope.
My hon. Friend the Minister can see my request coming like a big balloon because I have already discussed it with her. The time has come for a road map to release dentists from PPE and all the restrictions. We need a return to the pre-covid treatment of patients and we need SAGE to look at it and get on with it. That will be the biggest single action in enabling dentists to get this backlog into line.
My second wish is a push at an open door with the Minister. Dental care is preventable, but while there has been progress, we are badly behind, especially in caries prevention for children. Pre-pandemic, these children occupied 177 clinical general anaesthetic extraction cases in hospital—a complete waste of our services. The latest figure that I have seen is that 23,529 children between the ages of five and nine were admitted to hospital because they had tooth decay.
I first started practising dentistry in a deprived area in east London. The state of dentition there shocked me, especially the state of children’s dentition. It was not the deprivation that caused the poor dentition; it was the diet and the almost complete lack of oral hygiene. Put simply, kids and parents did not toothbrush. Some parents did not even know that toothbrushes existed. And if you went into the supermarket, the shelves were packed with biscuits and cakes, whereas there was little meat or vegetables; go to less deprived areas and it is the other way round. So, it is not the deprivation; it is the shoppers—the parents.
The Minister will know where I am going with this. She and the chief dental officer are already embarking on teaching children in teams throughout the country to brush their teeth. Coincidental with this, most children are accompanied by their parents, some of whom are stunned to see this little thing called a toothbrush. But the message is getting through; as the hon. Member for Bedford said, we are starting to get some progress, and it is happening quite quickly.
As I have said, tooth decay is essentially highly preventable. Water fluoridation is the single most effective public measure that could be taken to prevent tooth decay. At the moment, implementation of fluoridation is in the power of local authorities. Little progress has been made. We lag behind every other western nation. Most of our western nation comparators have a fluoridation rate of domestic water supplies of between 60% and 80%, but we have a rate of only 10%. It is the system; the costs are to the local authorities and the cost-benefits are to the national health service.
The process of consultation over fluoridation is lengthy and tedious, and it is providing a platform for protesters of the same type as the anti-vaccination people. Some of the things that they say are quite extraordinary. I had to listen to a man explaining to me that he had done some research. He said that he had been to a town with young people and no fluoride, and to a town with older people with fluoride, and the venereal disease rate in the town with young people was higher than that in the town with older people. Therefore, according to him, if we put fluoride into the water supply, people got venereal disease. And to my astonishment, there were other people there who actually believed that nonsense.
To make a more practical point, there are considerable difficulties for both local authorities and water companies, in that their boundaries are rarely, if ever, coterminous. So, it makes eminent sense for the implementation
process for the new schemes of fluoridation to be put in the hands of central Government and driven by central Government, which is the Minister’s proposal.
In doing so, however, I hope that the Government will curtail the procedures on consultation. In every period of consultation, in every place of consultation, the same thing is said by the same people, and I believe that the same nutters come out. If we continue with that process, we will have a repetition of the scaremongering stories from people who are basically cranks.
The safety, efficiency, cost-effectiveness and benefit of fluoride in water supplies, whether it is achieved naturally —as is the case in many parts of the world—or artificially, is proven to be workable and to achieve dramatic reductions in tooth decay. With this proposed step and the Government’s determination, rather than our lagging behind the rest of the world we could actually lead, and I hope that we move to do so.