1 day Ago By Rebecca Thomas
Almost three thousand children had tooth decay so severe they attended A&E last year, new data reveals. MPs have called for an end to the “national scandal” facing NHS dental care, as new figures reveal that in some areas of the country, A&E attendances for tooth decay have risen 40-fold since 2019. Figures obtained by the Liberal Democrat Party under the Freedom of Information Act reveal 2,800 children attended A&E due to tooth decay issues last year – up by a fifth since 2019 but slightly down on 2023.
Overall, there were 16,100 A&E attendances over tooth decay in 2024, with areas such as Northwest Anglia NHS Trust seeing cases increase from just 6 in 2019 to 238. The data was gathered by Liberal Democrats from 61 out of 141 NHS trusts. The figures come after a report this month from the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) said the national dental plan set out by the former government had “comprehensively failed”.
The PAC’s report said the current national contract for dentists “remains unfit for purpose”, with current arrangements only sufficient for about half of England’s population to see an NHS dentist over two years. The Liberal Democrats’ health and social care spokesperson Helen Morgan said: "It is a national scandal that children are ending up in A&E in agony because they can’t get a dentist appointment. “Parents are being forced to watch their little ones cry through the night, all because the NHS dental system has been left to rot.
We’re now seeing vast swathes of the country being turned into dental deserts, with no sign of things getting better. “This almost medieval situation of people pulling their own teeth out with pliers as they can’t get an appointment must end. That must start with a complete overhaul of the dental contract to boost the numbers of dentists and appointments and finally rid this country of dental deserts.
” She claimed that after the Conservative party's “neglect”, the Labour government is now showing a “devastating lack of ambition to turn things around”. Last year, the Conservative government pledged it would fund more than 1.5 million additional NHS treatments or 2.
5 million appointments. The plan unveiled by officials at the time included a new patient premium (NPP) in dental contracts, with practices able to receive credits for each eligible new patient they saw. It also included a “golden hello” recruitment scheme, which introduced £20,000 incentive payments for dentists and mobile dental vans targeting communities.
However, according to the PAC, the NPP – which has cost at least £88 million since it was introduced last March – has resulted in 3 per cent fewer new patients seeing an NHS dentist. In February, the proportion of five-year-olds with rotting teeth was rising in the North East, London and the South West , prompting warnings from surgeons and dentists. The data revealed as many as six in 10 children in some areas have rotting teeth by the age of five, with clear differences between poorer regions of England and the more affluent.
A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said: “This government inherited a broken NHS dental sector after years of neglect, but we are getting on with fixing it through our Plan for Change. “We’ve already begun the rollout of 700,000 extra urgent dental appointments, and a ‘golden hello’ scheme is underway to recruit dentists to areas with most need – with hundreds of posts advertised. “We will reform the dental contract to make NHS work more appealing to dentists, and we’ve announced a national supervised toothbrushing programme to prevent tooth decay in young children.
”.
