Chamber and committees

If you do not mind, I will pass that question to Tom Ferris.

That is a really important question to ask. Broadly speaking, we intend to maintain access to NHS dentistry across Scotland through the reforms. I will hand over to Tom Ferris.

We should remember that everybody under 26 gets free dentistry and, as I have said, between 20 and 25 per cent of adults do not pay for their NHS dentistry. What we had to do was look at the best way of ensuring that we sustained the number of dentists and dental practices in Scotland, and it was felt that a slight increase in the fees was the right move. The fees are still capped at £384.

As I think I mentioned earlier, the concern that I have been hearing with regard to dentistry is about access. That is the issue that we believe the changes and amendments in the regulations will help us to address.

Most definitely. The cost of living issue floods through every decision that we make just now, so it is absolutely something that we will be keeping an eye on.

The Government supports people on low incomes in a number of ways. I think that between 20 and 25 per cent of adults in Scotland do not have to pay for their NHS treatment. The fact that we have free examinations is important as well.

Earlier, I highlighted other initiatives, such as childsmile for getting younger children into the habit of cleaning their teeth, which have been incredibly helpful. Statistics that came out today show that 82 per cent of primary 7 schoolchildren have no obvious tooth decay. That high level backs up the investment that we have put into the preventative side of oral healthcare for children.

The nub of the reforms is about ensuring that we sustain NHS dentistry in the long term. Like you, I have received lots of emails about the access that people have to dentistry. We have the reforms, but we also need to remember that the Scottish Government has put other grants in place. For example, the Scottish dental access initiative offers £100,000 for a new practice in an area. We have been in discussions with health boards to ensure that we target those grants in the right areas. We also have some remote—although I do not like using that term—grant payments, which are really important.

The conversations that Tom Ferris and I have with the health boards are also important, because the boards have a responsibility to look at how dental services are being provided in their jurisdictions. I was pleased to hear that Scottish Borders, Dumfries and Galloway and Highland are now working together to encourage more dentists to come to areas that have had recruitment issues. As I said to David Torrance, we also need to keep an eye on the breadth of skills in dental surgeries to ensure that they are supported.

That is a really good question. The first thing that came into my head on NHS dentistry, and NHS boards more widely, was that people can feed in their views on the Care Opinion website. To be honest, high street dentistry—if I may describe it as that—is very much constructed of individual businesses, as Tim McDonnell has just said. However, I encourage people to use Care Opinion if they want to give feedback on NHS dentistry.

That is a very wide question. As I have said previously, the changes in the fee structure and the regulations will maintain and ensure the sustainability of the service across Scotland.

On encouraging people into dentistry, one of the areas that we want to look at is the workforce. There have been two pretty big impacts on the dentistry workforce. One is from Brexit and the difficulty that it created in getting dentists from outwith the United Kingdom to come to the UK. I have written to all my counterparts and their chief dental officers in the four nations, and we are organising a meeting to talk about how we can improve the throughput if dentists wish to come to practise in the UK—and specifically Scotland, from our perspective.

We also want to look at improving the workforce within dentistry. For example, there are some very highly skilled dental technicians, and we would like to explore giving them a bigger locus in seeing patients. We are talking about the possibility of doing that. That is not a magic bullet that will solve our issues, so we are working together on a lot of things. That is why the connections and discussions that we have with dentists, as Tim McDonnell and Tom Ferris have highlighted, are so important, whether they are through the BDA more widely or through the NHS directors of dentistry.

The problem is that there is not an “average patient”. Everyone in Scotland comes as an individual to see their NHS dentist.

The letters that I have been getting—I am sure that you are the same as me, in this regard—are about access to service. That is what people are really pushing for: they want to ensure that we improve access to NHS dentistry. As I said earlier, what we aim to achieve through the changes in regulations and fee structures is sustainability of services.

The intention of the reforms is to ensure that we continue to make NHS dentistry attractive to dentists.