“Mummy, my tooth hurts,” my 11 year old son Eddie told me after breakfast one morning. “Don’t worry, I’m going to sort it out,” I reassured him while making a mental note to chase our local dentist surgery again. I spent the rest of the day trying to get through on the phone, emailing them, and worrying about my son.
We have been patients at a local surgery in Oxfordshire for over a decade now but it has become increasingly hard to get an appointment and duty of care seems to have been forgotten.
So I was not surprised to hear that, sadly, tens of thousands of children have been left in pain for more than a year, or even that the number of tooth extractions for children in hospital in England more than halved during the pandemic. According to reports in The Guardian, around 27,000 children in England have been waiting for up to 18 months for dental care – with delays being caused by staff shortages, patient demand and pressure on hospital capacity.
An estimated 3,000 dentists have left the NHS since the start of the pandemic and around 90 per cent of dentist practices across England are not accepting new patients, the Government’s latest NHS Dentistry report showed.
Eddie is autistic and has additional needs which means he can get very stressed by unexpected events or anything new and out of his usual daily routine. When we saw the dentist last year, we were told he needed to have a filling but needs to see a specialist dentist as he might have to be sedated. This was over a year ago and I keep chasing up to ask if he has had a referral, but my calls and emails seem to be ignored.
It’s so frustrating and I know the longer we leave it, the worse it will get. Anyone who has had toothache knows how painful it can be. Eddie’s pain seems to come and go but if it’s particularly painful I sometimes have to dose him up with Calpol. It makes me feel like a failure as parent when I have to tell him I don’t know when we can next be seen by the dentist.
Eddie is also visually impaired and had worn glasses since he was six months old. He has had to have eye checks every three months since he was a baby. It reached the stage where he became so distressed by the appointments and found the process of having drops put in his eyes that we had to have him sedated for a regular check-up. Our local ophthalmology NHS service has been considerably more “on it” than our dentist and we have had no problems getting appointments.
My eldest son, Charlie, who is 14, also needs a brace. I have asked for a referral numerous times to see an orthodontist. We finally got an appointment a few months ago and afterwards, the orthodontist wrote to the dentist to say our son needed to have a baby tooth taken out before she could fit him with a brace. Again, I chased up and even went in to see them with the letter to make sure they had received it, yet they still seemed to have had no record of it. After a bit of badgering, we had his tooth taken out (which took all of two minutes) a few weeks ago.
It was not this difficult to be treated when I was a child and had a dentist who was, rather amusingly, called Dr Fang, and who my siblings and I saw during our whole childhoods.
Surely we need to go on some sort of recruitment drive to attract, train and retrain more NHS dentists. And children should be prioritised for appointments because prevention is better than cure. Making sure children are treated sooner rather than later will reduce demand and problems later down the line.
Our children deserve better and the longer we leave it, the worse it’s going to get.