Teesside dentist calling for an overhaul to tackle NHS dentist shortage
Dentistry's one of the UK's most competitive university degrees
A dentist in Teesside's calling for a complete overhaul of the industry as the NHS continues to face workforce shortages.
It comes as thousands of A Level students are still choosing what to do after collecting their results yesterday and we're hearing dentistry's one of the UK's most competitive university degrees.
There's just 1,000 undergraduate places every year with around 9,000 to 10,000 people applying.
Paul Woodhouse, principal dentist at Grange Dental Practice in Norton, said: "It's hugely competitive but it wasn't quite as structured as it is now. It was much more down to interview and then receiving an offer and then satisfying that offer, but the courses were always oversubscribed. I think in my graduating class there was 73 of us in the year that I left in 2000, so it was hard to get onto the course, a lot of work, but very worthwhile in the end.
"The initial two years of university essentially are background physiology and biology and all sorts of stuff. But once you get onto the kind of physical part of dentistry, so for me that was the very, very end of second year, to teach somebody how to deal with patients and how to diagnose disease and how to treat disease, you actually have to be able to do it.
"The people doing the teaching are the hospital dentists themselves, consultants, they are university lecturers who work in dental hospitals, or they are people like me, general dental practitioners who take a day or so a week out of practice and going to universities to teach the students how to do dentistry.
"The trouble with the NHS system is that it's absolutely terrible. It was invented in 2006, the current system. It was first disparaged by the Health Select Committee in 2008 as being not fit for purpose. It hasn't changed at all, save a few cosmetic tweaks.
"It's a leaking bucket. So no matter how many graduates you throw into the system, they will realise how rubbish the system is and stop working in the system and you will have an absolute ton of private dentists and very, very few working in the NHS unless one Government completely reforms the system, just tears it up and starts again, which nobody's done since 2008.
"The NHS is very much a loss-inducing system of remuneration. The Department of Health or the Treasury don't pay the actual required rate to make dentistry work for a business. We want to do NHS dentistry, we want to provide health care, but we don't want our businesses to shut because we've taken massive personal and financial risks to own the business.
"I'm an independent business so currently I'm having struggles with my air compressors which run the entire building. A replacement is going to cost me £7,000 before I get to VAT and fitting. The NHS isn't paying that. I was crawling under the floorboards fixing a leaking air pipe to make sure that my dentists could work on that Friday.
"The phrase I use quite often is, if I knew how difficult and stressful dentistry was, I'd have been a builder. I love my job. I love fixing teeth. I can do some amazing things in 20 minutes to change the course of the way people feel about themselves, but added to that is all the other stuff that goes with being a dentist.
"It is an incredibly tough, stressful job. For the first three days I was on holiday a couple of weeks ago, I was answering emails related to the practice, I was trying to sort out repairs to compressed airlines remotely when I'm supposed to be relaxing and enjoying time with my family. You're never off. Neither of my kids want to go into dentistry because they see the stress that induces."