Brits are pulling their own teeth out with pliers because of the ever-worsening NHS dental crisis.
Jamie Totterdell said he’s been forced to do several DIY extractions because of him being unable to get an appointment over the last 16 years.
He couldn’t afford private treatment, although could pay for check-ups.
The only time Mr Totterdell managed to see an NHS dentist was via an emergency appointment after one of his DIY extractions went wrong.
He told ITV‘s Good Morning Britain: ‘One extraction I had to go to the dentist after because I’d left [pieces of] teeth in there.’
Mr Totterdell, whose age or location wasn’t revealed by the show, added: ‘They had to do surgery to rectify that.’
His eye-opening story was told in a section that highlighted how only 1 per cent of practices now offer an NHS appointment on demand.
Eddie Crouch, chair of the British Dental Association (BDA) said he was being contacted every week by people forced to perform DIY dentistry on themselves amid the appointments crisis.
He warned that people were potentially risking their lives due to the complications that can occur from a botched DIY extraction.
Mr Crouch said: ‘People hope they’ll be able to do it properly but obviously putting a pair of pliers in their mouth, they can’t see what they’re doing they end up breaking a tooth, leaving a root in that could get really badly infected.
‘We’ve seen people, sadly, with severe infections and are almost going into sepsis. It is shocking what could happen.’
Mr Crouch also revealed DIY dentistry wasn’t stopping at extractions, with some Brits resorting to using superglue to fix broken teeth.
Some of the practices GMB contacted had a five-year waiting list for NHS patients.
The findings come despite ministers promising to fix the ever-worsening NHS dental appointments crisis.
Desperate patients have endured mammoth 4am queues in a quest to be seen with others even flying to war-torn Ukraine for cheaper private dentistry.
GMB approached 100 dentists across 10 regions in England to enquire about the availability of NHS and private appointments.
This survey was a repeat of a similar investigation GMB conducted in 2016.
Then, all of the 10 regions had dentists that were able to offer an NHS appointment.
But in the latest survey just three regions had this capacity.
Overall, only 1 per cent of the dentists surveyed could offer an NHS appointment, a massive decrease on 2016’s figure of 13 per cent.
But access to private appointments has boomed over the same period.
The most recent survey found that 17 per cent of dental practices were able to offer a private appointment, up from 12 per cent eight years prior.
Private appointments for a basic dental check-up are routinely about £75, almost triple the NHS standard rate of £26.80.
But GMB reportedly found some practices were charging over £250 for urgent same day private appointments.
The investigation found private dental provision has exploded in major cities London.
In 2016 just 40 per cent of dentists in the capital were offering private appointments, but this rose to 70 per cent in the most recent survey.
One practice told GMB a same day appointment for a patient would cost £260.
It was a similar story in other regions of England.
In Leeds, none of the practices contacted could offer NHS appointments, but half could offer a same day private appointment.
Only one in 10 dental practices in Newcastle could offer an NHS appointment with this falling to zero in Norwich.
One dentist in Southampton told investigators it had a 2,000 strong waiting list for NHS appointments, and another in Leeds said they had a five-year waiting list.
The findings come despite the Government’s recently announced £200m dental recovery plan.
This offers dentists cash incentives of up to £50 per new NHS patient they saw as well as providing £20,000 golden hellos to attract them to working in England’s so-called ‘dental deserts’ where taxpayer subsidised dental appointments are lacking.
Minister have hoped the incentives would bring about an additional 2.5million appointments in the next year.
But the plan — unveiled 10 months after it was originally promised — was slammed by dental bosses and politicians for not going far enough.
The BDA has said that it amounted to ‘rearranging the deckchairs’ and wouldn’t bring the desired, and much-needed, change.
Official figures show 24,151 dentists took on NHS work in England in 2022-23, down from 24,272 in the previous financial year – a drop of 121.
The most recent total is roughly 500 fewer than the number of dentists carrying out NHS work in 2019-20, the last year before the Covid pandemic struck.
The BDA fears numbers could drop even further to below 24,000, a figure not recorded since 2014-15.
NHS dentist attendance figures for both adults and children dived off a cliff during the Covid pandemic as practices shut as part of lockdown rules and stopped offering treatments.
But it has failed to bounce back despite the darkest days of the pandemic being well into the past.
Industry experts suggest this is because offering NHS treatment is not as lucrative as going private.
Old NHS contracts for dentists paid them for batches of work carried out rather than for individual treatments, regardless how complicated a particular case might be.
In practice, this meant NHS dentists were paid the same for treating a patient that needed 10 fillings as for a patient that needed just one.
This resulted in dentists losing money from treating some NHS patients as what they were paid didn’t cover the costs of doing the procedure.
While this contact has now been reformed, the BDA estimates thousands of NHS dentists abandoned or vastly scaled back their NHS work post-pandemic.
Compounding the crisis is that as more dentists ditch or vastly reduce their NHS work, those who remain risk become overwhelmed.
A BDA post-pandemic survey of dentists in 2022 suggested three quarters were experiencing burnout, feeling unable to spend sufficient time with their patients to give them the care they needed.
And, much like with the GP appointments crisis, as patients struggle to get access frustrations can boil over.
The same BDA survey found 86 per cent of dentists said their practice had received physical or verbal abuse from patients.
A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson told GMB that the Government’s dental recovery plan meant ‘more practices are already accepting new adult patients across England.’
The latest figures, for June last year, show roughly 26million adults (about 60 per cent of the population) haven’t had a check-up in the last two years.
This is one of the lowest proportions since modern records start in 2006.
Source: Mail Online
