§ Mr. PikeTo ask the Secretary of State for Health what steps the Government are taking to increase the number of NHS dentists(a) nationally and (b) in the North-West; and if he will make a statement. [127069]
§ Ms StuartThere are currently 17,821 dentists working in the General Dental Services in England and 2,261 in the north west region, more than ever before. Problems have arisen because more dentists are devoting more time to private dental work, working part-time and there are some areas where dentists seem reluctant to practice. We have accepted the Doctors' and Dentists' Review Body 363W recommendation for a commitment scheme rewarding loyalty to the National Health Service. The scheme will cost £17 million per annum for England. The personal dental services pilot scheme, including dental access centres, is encouraging health authorities to be locally responsive and contribute to make NHS dentistry more widely available. Investing in dentistry saw £10 million in grants given to NHS dentists in return for promises of up to 900,000 new NHS registrations. Further measures will be contained in our dental strategy, due to be published this summer.
Note:
Expenditure is taken from health authority annual accounts which are prepared on a resource basis and therefore differ from cash allocations in each year. (These are not the total amounts spent on healthcare. General Dental Services expenditure is separately accounted for and cannot be analysed by health authority over the three years). Since 1997–98 drugs expenditure has been mainly accounted for by the Prescription Pricing Authority. For consistency figures have been reduced by the amount of non-cash limited prescribing expenditure accounted for by the health authority in each year.