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the firms behind your dentist |
Imagine that the governors of Eton, Harrow or Winchester started buying
up comprehensive schools and then writing to parents to inform them
that, henceforth, they would have to pay hefty fees for their children's
education. Something very similar has happened to the NHS dentistry
service and it explains why 300 people in Scarborough recently queued
for hours in the bitter cold to register with a newly arrived NHS
dentist.
The media blamed the problem highlighted by the Scarborough queue
on the shortage of qualified dentists and "abysmal" NHS
payment rates--which translate as an annual salary of about [pounds
sterling]50,000 after expenses. There was not a word on how private
dental chains have contributed to a situation in which less than half
the population can now go to an NHS dentist. Most NHS dentists, with
the exception of 2,000 or so salaried "community" dentists
and those working in hospitals, have never been employed directly
by the state.
But practices that previously offered NHS treatment have been taken
over by the private chains in what is, to all intents and purposes,
a privatisation as sweeping and as damaging as any we have lived through
in the past 20 years. When I revealed in the NS last August how the
largest chain, Oasis Healthcare plc, was converting NHS practices
to private-only treatment, its chief executive, Malcolm Hughes, wrote
to deny that the company had anything to do with "the parlous
state" of NHS dentistry.
It is not an assertion with which NHS patients registered at the Park
Lodge surgery in Brackley, Northamptonshire, would concur. In November,
a year after Oasis had taken over, they were informed in writing of
the company's "new approach to your dentistry".
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