The jury is still out on the question of what (in particular) prompted the Department of Health to release the story in mid-October that dentists were recalling healthy patients more often than was really necessary and ‘playing the system’ in order to pick up UDAs for little or no extra work. Given that the enhanced data set has only been collected for courses of treatment completed in the past six months, it seems somewhat premature to have formed and gone public on such a sweeping opinion. Prior to that, a ‘Band One’ claim did not necessarily
imply that a check up had been carried out.
The same reports refer obliquely to evidence of ‘splitting’, i.e. breaking up what is essentially one course of treatment (attracting one patients charge) into several phases (attracting new patients charges each time). I spotted no mention of any suggestion that ‘splitting’ was more prevalent in the treatment of patients who did not pay NHS dental charges.
