Thurso clinic bites into NHS dental backlog
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THE number of people gaining access to dental healthcare in Caithness has increased significantly since a new NHS clinic opened at the beginning of this year.
Figures show since Dunbar Hospital in Thurso opened its doors to its new dental clinic in January, 4000 people have had dental examinations in the last 11 months, meeting 83 per cent of the waiting list.
Now with plans to extend the opening hours of its dental unit, it is hoped that the facility will be able to meet the needs of everyone who is waiting for NHS dental treatment by the end of 2013.
General dental practitioner John Barry, who runs the unit, predicted that within the next year, the waiting list will have been eradicated.
He said that through meeting patients so far, it was clear that the area had suffered from a lack of provision of dental care.
"The shortfall in dentistry provision here has resulted in a lot of people in the area having considerable dental health problems but the outlook is now looking far brighter," he said.
"Access to dental health in Caithness had been very limited for many years but our practice is now making massive improvements.
"We have an excellent and well-motivated team of four dentists and a therapist and have recruited 12 new nursing staff, some qualified and some receiving training.
"We are also delivering an emergency dental pain service to address some of the serious problems many people have.
"Not only have we created some jobs in the community but we are providing a much-needed service in an area which has for many years had a huge waiting list for NHS dental treatment."
Based in the far north for 25 years, Dr Barry took on the lease on the new clinic — built by NHS Highland at a cost of £1.2 million — with the intention of running it as an NHS-committed practice. When it opened its doors at the beginning of the year, the waiting list for NHS dental treatment in Caithness stood at 4833.
The standard general dental practitioner lease was the first of its type to be agreed in Scotland.
It stipulated that a minimum of 80 per cent of the practice’s gross income comes from NHS dental services and that the practice delivers services for 6000 NHS patients.
The lease also requires the practice to participate in the NHS Highland dental out-of-hours service.
Dr Barry explained that the practice, which has four surgeries, is set to increase its opening hours from 8am to 7.30pm in a bid to work through the waiting list quicker.
He said it would work on meeting the needs of everyone on the waiting list by taking on tranches of 1000 patients at a time, examining and then treating them before moving on to the next batch of 1000.
"We were determined not just to work our way through the numbers but to ensure that we were properly treating each patient before moving on to the next one," he said.
NHS Highland dental service development manager Alex Fraser said the dental unit has made a valuable contribution to improving dental health in Caithness by significantly improving access to NHS care.
She said: "We built the new Dunbar dental clinic to address the very serious access problem that had developed in Caithness and it is good to see that our investment, and that of Dr Barry and his team, is now benefiting so many people."
