In England, only a third of adults – and half of children – now have access to an NHS dentist. As those in pain turn to charity-run clinics for help, can anything stop the rot?
t is over an hour before the emergency dental clinic is due to open, but Jodie Manning is taking no chances. She hasn’t been able to eat for four days – “I can’t physically bite down any more” – and is determined to get an appointment. Sitting on a plastic chair outside a community centre in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, the student hairdresser is a picture of misery, periodically clutching her cheek and looking down at the number she has been given to mark her place in the rapidly growing queue.
Further up the queue, David Mead is more cheerful. Having recently been homeless, living in a tent in nearby Sudbury – “Look me up, I was in the local newspaper: ‘Sudbury rallies around homeless 19-year-old’!” – he says he has hardly cleaned his teeth for 10 years. A few weeks ago they started to hurt as he ate. “I want to find out what’s going wrong there,” he says.
Hence taking Ruby out of school on a Thursday morning to see a mobile dentist from a charity originally set up 20 years ago to deliver dental equipment to the developing world. Dentaid was founded in 1996 off the back of a project to help treat prisoners at a jail in Ukraine. It then began refurbishing donated equipment and sending it to charitable dental clinics across the world. As funding increased, Dentaid started projects in 70 countries including Malawi, Cambodia and Uganda.
The charity’s first two visits to Bury St Edmunds were prompted by campaigning from a group called Toothless in Surrey and funded by Dentaid. To pay for the return trips, Higgins and seven fellow councillors, including Turner, chipped in £400 each from their “locality budgets”. It is not really what those funds are for, she says. “They’re supposed to be for getting up a playgroup, or if the community centre asks us to fund a second tea urn.
Even if the developers were obliged to contribute cash towards a new dental surgery, as they often are with new schools, there is no guarantee the NHS would be able to find any dentists prepared to staff it. Talbot, who now works in a London dental hospital providing treatment to disabled and homeless people, used work in an NHS community practice. “It was hard,” she says. “You see 30 patients a day in 10-minute appointments and can’t do the dentistry you want to do.
It costs £400 every time someone goes to A&E with toothache, even if they’re only given painkillers. A checkup costs £20