Posted in Posts
The new management team at the GDC should be given time, Michael Watson says. The Conference of Local Dental Committees (LDCs) did not start well for the General Dental Council (GDC). The very first motion, which was passed overwhelmingly, called for ‘the immediate resignation of the chair of the GDC’. It was followed by another…
Posted in Posts
After Sara Hurley’s latest talk at the Conference of Local Dental Committees, Michael Watson explains how dentistry is run in England. The Conference of Local Dental Committees (LDCs) can be a difficult audience to impress, but last Friday in Manchester Sara Hurley, chief dental officer (England), gave an impressive presentation well received by representatives and…
Posted in Posts
The new management team at the GDC needs to stop the ‘witch hunt’, Michael Watson says. It is now two years since the chairman of the General Dental Council (GDC), Bill Moyes, delivered the Pendlebury lecture at the Faculty of General Dental Practice. He said there had been a 110% increase in complaints to the…
Posted in Posts
Alistair Burt’s speech represents a new strategic approach to tackle oral health issues, Michael Watson says. When I arrived in Manchester, I sought opinions about what might be in the minister’s speech the next day. The consensus of opinion was that I might as well have stayed at home and looked at what I wrote last year.…
Posted in Posts
The number of children going to hospital for dental extractions is a ‘national scandal’, Health Minister, Alistair Burt MP has said. Giving the keynote address at the 2016 BDA Conference in Manchester he explained they should not be tolerated in 2016, but he was not going to blame this on dentists. Day by day dental…
Posted in Posts
Michael Watson highlights the weaknesses with the current NHS dental contract. I shall be at the BDA Conference in Manchester this week and on Friday it is to be addressed by Health Minister Alistair Burt MP. Recently he has had to answer questions from MPs on why their constituents are unable to access NHS dentistry. Lord…
Posted in Posts
Maybe we should stop waiting for a new dental contract and live with UDAs, Michael Watson suggests. Just over 65 years ago, Samuel Beckett’s play, Waiting for Godot, hit the West End stage. To quote Wikipedia, the two-act play features ‘two bedraggled companions’ Vladimir and Estragon who ‘ramble and bicker pointlessly’ throughout. They are waiting…
Posted in Posts
Who is to blame for the faults in dentistry, Michael Watson questions. I listened to a Radio 4 programme last week, entitled ‘The Blame Game’ led by former MI5 chief, Eliza Manningham-Buller. She was director general of MI5 from 2002 to 2007 and talked to people working in environments where it seems that someone must…
Posted in Posts
We should spend more time seeing high-risk children then recalling low-risk patients, Michael Watson says. Doctors are beginning to ask if health checks for the over-40s are really necessary and whether they cut the risk of disease. A new study, by Imperial College London, of 50,000 who turned up for these ‘midlife MoTs’ showed that…
Posted in Posts
The dental profession should get behind those working to make prevention a reality, Michael Watson says. Alistair Burt MP, who is the Minister of State at the Department of Health, has set out the steps he is taking to improve dental standards amongst primary school age children, in reply to a parliamentary question. Since 2013,…
Posted in Posts
Fresh thinking is needed to provide children with preventive dentistry, Michael Watson says. Forty years ago, a professional lifetime for most dentists, the Court Report (on child health services) was published. It called the item of service payments system ‘inappropriate’ for children and advocated prevention for children through a capitation system of payment. Sound familiar?…
Posted in Posts
NHS pension issues are the fault of the government, not the employer, Michael Watson says. ‘You’re doing it wrong’, says Alan Suggett, dental business unit partner at the accountancy firm UNW. When your accountant tells you that you are getting it wrong, it’s time to sit up and take notice. It almost certainly means you are…
Posted in Posts
It is not the UDA system that needs changing, Michael Watson believes. On the 10th anniversary of the introduction of the UDA contract, the British Dental Association (BDA) issued a press release about a survey of its members showing that NHS dentistry is failing patients. The question that has to be asked is whether the fault…
Posted in Posts
Michael Watson looks into the latest NASDAL figures on dentists’ earnings. Before Easter, the National Association of Specialist Dental Accountants and Lawyers (NASDAL) published its statistics for dentists’ earnings in the tax year 2014/15. Returns for that year, for the self-employed, had to be with the revenue authorities by 31 January this year, so as…
Posted in Posts
Funds raised from the new sugar tax should be reinvested in oral health strategies, Michael Watson says. Political commentators sometimes observe a budget that is applauded as it is delivered, unravel in the following week. This was certainly true of George Osborne’s 2012 budget, which went down in history as an ‘omnishambles’. Could the same…
Posted in Posts
Could the increase in NHS dentistry fees cause dentists to look elsewhere to reach their UDA target, Michael Watson questions. Two announcements concerning money were made last week. The first was how little the increase in dentists’ net income would be next year. The second was how much patients’ charges would increase, not only on…
Posted in Posts
Sara Hurley is determined to provide a new approach to dental care and oral health, Michael Watson believes. Outside the Ministry of Defence in Whitehall there are statues of three generals of World War II. Two of them – Montgomery and Slim – are well known as field commanders; the third less so, General Alan…
Posted in Posts
It is the patient’s fault, not necessarily the dentists’, for an increase in extractions through 2014/15, says Michael Watson. Over the weekend the media were full of the explosive figures from the Health and Social Care Information Centre showing that there were 14,445 children aged under five, admitted to hospital for extractions under general anaesthetic in…
Posted in Posts
We cannot rely on the Government, manufacturers and retailers to reduce sugar intake and improve children’s oral health, Michael Watson says. Now that David Cameron has finished his negotiation across Europe and last week in Brussels, he will have to give his attention to sugar, childhood obesity and dental decay. For the many weeks past,…
