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Seventeen days is the average period during that we adhere to New Year’s resolutions apparently. So by this time in January most of us will have consigned those we made to history. There are, however, people in two organisations that should have made resolutions for 2015 and be sticking with them. The first concerns those in charge…
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On 2 January the Daily Telegraph published a letter signed by over one hundred dentists, a new version of the letter printed in the same newspaper on the same day last year, organised again by Yorkshire dentist, Tony Kilcoyne. It was published a year to the day after a similar letter from the same stable…
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Over a month ago the area team (AT) of NHS England wrote to dental practices about maintaining services over the Christmas period, apart from the bank holidays. The letters reminded them that the contracts stipulated the times during which access to ‘urgent and routine’ treatment must be maintained. Most letters said that on all days,…
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Michael Watson explains how the current dental contract could be made to work, and why it currently isn’t. Long before Harry Potter, medieval alchemists were searching for the philosopher’s stone, the magic formula that would turn base metal into gold. I see the search for a new dental contract, which will transform NHS dentistry into a…
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Last Monday I spent an away day at a football stadium to educate myself in managing my type two diabetes. Organised by Diabetes UK and sponsored by Tesco, it was an excellent course and attracted 100+ people. We were given a list of 15 ‘care essentials’ that need to be checked, from blood sugar, retina, feet blood…
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Last week’s media frenzy about the recall of 22,000 patients of a Nottingham dentist seen over a period of 30 years raises a number of questions. In case you haven’t seen these reports, they revolve around dentist Mr D’Mello, who had been reported for poor hygiene practices including not changing gloves between patients and not…
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My intention this week had been to steer clear of the General Dental Council (GDC), however Mr Moyes’s talk to the Parliamentary Group last week led me to reconsider. Apart from refusing to answer any questions from the British Dental Association’s (BDA’s) Mick Armstrong, he made a number of contentious remarks that deserve some analysis. According to…
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I don’t know what surprised me most last Wednesday – the BDA (British Dental Association) welcoming moving prevention from practice to schoolroom, or the BBC report that teachers would ‘check kids teeth’. Of course the media reporting was a bit of an exaggeration. What the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) actually said…
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The expression ‘If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is’ probably goes back 500 years or more, when the phrase ‘Too good to be true’ entered the English language. So why was it necessary last week for the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) to warn dentists about the potential danger…
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The date is 8 May, 2015. Her Majesty the Queen is preparing to invite Nigel Farage to form a Government and become her 13th UK Prime Minister. The Buckingham Palace official arranging the transport is somewhat surprised to be told to send the car to the Red Lion pub in Whitehall. ‘We normally send it to…
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Many in the profession will find themselves this week at the BDIA Showcase in London at Excel. It is a good opportunity to talk to exhibitors and colleagues about where dentistry, whether NHS or private, is going. It is a question prompted in my mind by recent developments in retail, with large supermarkets in deep…
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It is now six months since health minister, Lord Howe, speaking at the BDA Conference outlined a timetable for reform. This summer there would be a consultation, followed in the autumn by proposals for new ‘prototype’ pilots. Volunteer practices would start these in 2015/16, modified in the light of experience, before others were added over…
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A group of Local Dental Committees (LDCs) has produced a proposal for possible alternative contract reform as a framework to generate debate to help find some possible solutions. Early drafts of the alternative contract were produced by a small group of practitioners working with the LDC chairs of Hull and East Yorkshire, North Yorkshire and…
