Dentists to get £20,000 ‘golden hello’ to work in NHS crisis areas

‘I know that in many parts of the country just finding an NHS dentist can be difficult, even impossible’

DENTISTS will be paid “golden hellos” of £20,000 to move to rural areas where there is a shortage of NHS appointments under plans announced by the health service today.

Lump sums will be offered to 240 dentists willing to relocate to “dental deserts” where patients cannot access care.

Dentists will also be paid up to £50 for every NHS patient they see who has not had an appointment in the past two years. The latest figures suggest this is more than half of England – around 30 million people.

Patients, meanwhile, will be forced to pay more for a check-up, with the minimum price set to increase from £23 to £28 unless they are exempt.

There are around 2,300 people for every dentist in England, but they are not evenly distributed around the country.

The scale of the crisis was highlighted on Monday as hundreds of people descended on a new dental practice in Bristol, the first in the city to offer NHS appointments for more than six months.

Victoria Atkins, the Health Secretary, pledged to “jump-start” NHS dentistry with the initiative, being funded by £200million of government investment.

In an article for The Telegraph, she wrote: “I know that in many parts of the country just finding an NHS dentist can be difficult, even impossible – and many do not want to take on new NHS patients. That is why today we’re launching the dentistry recovery plan to jump-start the sector.” Ms Atkins said this would be delivered by “offering cash incentives to dentists taking on new NHS patients and golden hello payments of up to £20,000 over three years”.

A newly qualified dentist will earn a base salary of £36,288 in the NHS in their first year, increasing to £43,923 in the second year. The most experienced dentists earn base salaries of around £130,000, which does not include private work.

The NHS predicts an extra 2.5 million appointments will be delivered over the next year under the plans. Nearly five million people have been denied an appointment with an NHS dentist in the past two years, according to research published in October.

Fluoride will be added to water under the first programme of its kind under the plans. The natural chemical, found in soil, food and water, is added to toothpaste because it helps strengthen tooth enamel and increases protection against tooth decay.

While it is already added to drinking supplies, the NHS said increasing the concentration in areas where it is lower than optimal, starting in the north-east of England, could help reduce tooth decay and extractions and benefit 1.6 million people.

A quarter of children have rotting teeth by the age of five, according to a

report published earlier this week, while 52,000 patients across England went to A&E with an abscess caused by tooth decay in 2022-23.

Specialist dental vans will also be used in parts of the country where patients are struggling to access appointments. The vans will provide pop-up appointments and move around “dental deserts” to tackle the backlog, including in rural and coastal areas such as the south-west of England, where fewer than 1 per cent of dental surgeries have been accepting new patients.

Roving dental teams will also target schools and nurseries, while pregnant women will be targeted in a “smile for life” initiative that will give advice and treatments to young children and parents. Ms Atkins said it would make oral hygiene part of a child’s routine before they start school, “because it is not the job of primary school teachers to watch children brushing their teeth”.

Labour, which will roll out supervised tooth-brushing at schools for children aged three to five if it comes to power, said the Government had stolen its ideas. Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, said: “Patients are desperately queuing around the block to see a dentist, literally pulling their own teeth out. The Conservatives are only promising to do something about it now there’s an election coming. By adopting Labour’s proposals for recruitment and supervised tooth-brushing, they are finally admitting that they are out of ideas of their own.”

Health sources denied the images of patients clamouring to register on Monday had fast-tracked publication of the plan. Industry leaders, including Neil Carmichael, the executive chairman of the Association of Dental Groups, welcomed the initiatives but called on the Government to start its consultation on a dental contract reform. Proposals in Mr Sunak’s long-term workforce plan, published last June suggested a tie-in scheme to force dentists to spend a minimum amount of time delivering NHS care after they qualified.