‘GOLDEN hellos’ worth £20,000, mobile dentistry vans and more emergency appointments will all be used to try and turn around Somerset’s dentistry crisis.

The number of Somerset adults who regularly see an NHS dentist has dropped dramatically over the last six years, with declining trends being accelerated as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.

The Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC) published its dental recovery plan in February, putting in place numerous initiatives to ensure more people could access dentists.

NHS Somerset has laid out how these national initiatives will be complemented by more local measures, focussed around the county’s growing urban areas.

Rather than working directly for the NHS, dentists are private contractors, who enter into agreements with NHS England to provide a certain amount of treatments (known as units of dental activity) per year.

Each dental practice has an agreed amount of units of dental activity which it must perform – and if it doesn’t meet them, the NHS allows other practices to bid for the remaining units on a short-term basis to meet demand, known as ‘clawback’.

In 2023/24, just over one in six adults in Somerset (18.22 per cent) saw a dentist once within a two-year period – a drop from just over half of adults (56.81 per cent) in 2017/18.

In the same period, the proportion of Somerset children who saw a dentist at least once every two years fell from three in five (60.64 per cent) to less than one in three (32 per cent).

Somerset has a lower access rate to NHS dentistry than the average across the south west, and has a lower proportion of dentists taking on NHS contracts.

Matthew Mills, NHS Somerset’s head of pharmaceutical, optical and dental services, published details of the county’s dental recovery plan ahead of a meeting of the NHS Somerset integrated care board in Frome on May 23.

He said: “The south west experienced challenges prior to the covid-19 pandemic, with difficulties in recruiting to dentist and dental nurse vacancies.

“This impacted on the ability of providers to provide the full range of appointments they are contracted to deliver.”