SIR Chris Whitty will be paying a visit to Minehead in the coming months following calls from the local MP to ease the dental crisis in rural Somerset.
Mr Whitty, who came to public prominence during the coronavirus pandemic, serves as chief medical officer and interim permanent secretary to the Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC).
Rachel Gilmour, the Liberal Democrat MP for Tiverton and Minehead, met Mr Whitty on Monday, March 10, to discuss her constituents’ struggles to access NHS dental services.
Mr Whitty has now promised to visit the town in the coming months to judge the scale of the problem.
Recent statistics from the public accounts committee (on which Mrs Gilmour sits) show that the Tiverton and Minehead constituency has the worst level of NHS dentist treatment delivery in England, with 382 courses of treatment per 1,000 people.
According to the House of Commons Library, 34.7 per cent of Devon adults and 32.2 per cent of Somerset adults have seen a dentist in the last two years – lower than during the coronavirus pandemic.
Mrs Gilmour’s constituency currently only has ten dental practices which carry out NHS dental work, and not all of them are currently able to take on NHS patients – either due to a lack of staff or a lack of NHS work being commissioned by the Devon or Somerset integrated care boards.
During their meeting, Mrs Gilmour and Mr Whitty discussed the creation of a “joined-up template” to deliver NHS primary care in rural and coastal areas, which have historically suffered from poor access to well-funded public services.
Following her visit to the Ponsford 59 dental practice in late-February, Mrs. Gilmour used the meeting to highlight the reasons why Minehead had struggled to recruit and retain healthcare professionals – including the town’s poor road and rail links, social deprivation and the standard of education being delivered at local schools.
Mr Whitty agreed that “a cross-party approach” was required to tackle NHS “dental deserts”, and promised to visit Minehead “in the near-future” to get a first-hand picture of the situation.
Following their meeting, Mrs Gilmour said: “Having met with Sir Chris Whitty, I am much more hopeful for the future.
“In the short-term, government departments are on the same page as me in their ideas of how to tackle the NHS dentistry crisis in our area.
“This involves a joined-up, comprehensive plan as to how to reach coastal and rural communities that are so often cut off from other services, and how best to train and retain NHS dentists.
“Since the public accounts committee meeting, where I vocalised how disappointed I was to see our area with the worst levels of NHS dentist treatment delivery in the country, I have welcomed the government’s decision of 700,000 extra urgent appointments.”
The date for Mr Whitty’s Minehead visit will be confirmed in the coming weeks.