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‘Six-monthly check-ups’ hard to change, says CDO
20th Oct 2008
The Department of Health risked angering the profession last week by accusing NHS dentists of seeing their regular patients more often than necessary – preventing others from getting appointments.
However, chief dental officer Barry Cockcroft drew on his own years of practising to sympathise with the dental profession.
The DoH said new data showed many patients were being seen every six months when clinical guidance recommended that adults with healthy teeth generally needed to visit a dentist only once every two years.
It's believed that changing the practice could free up as many as 800,000 appointments – 10% of the regular workload – for those currently struggling to see a dentist.
But Barry Cockccroft said: ‘I am aware from my own time in PDS how difficult it can be to change
something that has been part of the culture in dentistry for so long, butmany are doing it.
‘NICE guidance clearly says that there is no standard recall interval and that it should be agreed with each patient based on clinical need.'
He added: ‘As levels of disease drop and oral health improves we would expect recall intervals for more people to be longer than six months but always based on clinical need.'
DoH officials, who have compared records returned by NHS dentists, suspect some practitioners are intentionally recalling patients too often, or dividing courses of treatment and forcing patients to pay extra in order to boost their income.
But the CDO maintains it was a ‘small, but significant, number of contracts' in which the recall intervals for patients was anomalous when compared with the majority of
their peers – and promised that PCTs will be looking at this with the providers.
He concluded: ‘Clearly it has no impact on incomes but does impact on patients and the
ability of the NHS to grow services.'
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