Predators of profit sank their teeth in

THEY say there is more likelihood of dancing with the tooth fairy than finding an NHS dentist.

Those people who fought tooth and nail for NHS healthcare, free at the point of delivery and based on need rather than the ability to pay, would be horrified to see today the way it has been savaged. George Bernard Shaw, in his You Can Never Tell, portrays a late 19th century dentist’s operating room complete with a “whip provided with a stand, a pedal, and an exaggerated winch” – in other words a drill.

The dentist, described as someone whose business is to hurt people, has been paid five shillings (which he charges for everything) for the pleasure. To cap the price at five shillings at that time would have been jaw droppingly cheap compared to today’s prices.

Building on the Beveridge Report, after a gruelling series of negotiations with the BMA and persistent opposition from the Tories which they regarded as a bridge too far, Aneurin Bevan had produced in 1948 a cultural shift in health care.

The biographer of ‘Nye’ described it as removing one of the shadows from the lives of British people – worry and fear about how to cope financially with illness.

Wales can be proud of its role in the birth of the NHS and many would argue that life in the little Welsh town of ‘Drineffy’ of AJ Cronin’s The Citadel and the Tredegar Medical Aid Society paved the way for the creation of the NHS. Certainly, Drineffy’s needless deaths, desperation and Dr Manson’s packed consulting room ‘choked with the steam of damp bodies’ was a powerful insight into the health of the disadvantaged.

Nye’s NHS included dental care, but in no time the predators of profit sank their teeth into that. The result is that 70 years later the poor are resorting to pulling their own teeth out and the wealthy go private.

The NHS Wales website dentists’ section begins with the words: “Everyone should have access to good quality NHS dental services”.

It’s a toothless statement without increased and sustained investment in dental care from Welsh Government.