'People are being forced to travel miles for a dentist'
LDRsResidents in need of dental treatment are being forced to travel for miles out of their community to access NHS services, a councillor has warned.
Durham County councillor Stephen Bowron hit out at the local NHS Integrated Care Board (ICB) - the body responsible for commissioning health services - saying it was refusing to fund a new dentist in his Chilton ward.
The Reform councillor said: "They expect residents to travel to Durham City or the coast in an emergency. For many, this is not possible."
A spokesman for the North East and North Cumbria ICB acknowledged the difficulty in accessing NHS dental services locally and said this mirrored the national situation.
Bowron said he wanted to see better access to the NHS service for people in Chilton.
He said there was a "fully kitted-out dentist's surgery" in the town and he had found a dentist willing to take it on, but without funding this would not be possible.
"A perfectly good local dentist's surgery is standing idle and unused," he said.
LDRsPeople throughout the region have gone years without a dental appointment due to a significant backlog of appointments, huge waiting lists, and not enough practices, reports the Local Democracy Reporting Service.
The ICB said issues affecting dentistry included difficulties recruiting and training dentists.
Many dentists also report "struggling to afford the cost of delivering NHS services", the spokesman said.
"Some of the challenges faced by NHS dentistry require fundamental reforms to the dental contract," they said.
They added government measures to improve NHS dentistry were coming in in April, with a focus on urgent care and complex needs.
The ICB said: "We have recently invested £9.5 million on a new model of care to ensure people can manage urgent dental issues safely.
"This includes bringing online a network of 23 Urgent Dental Access Centres (UDACs) that will provide over 100,000 urgent dental appointments every year."
New UDACs opened in Durham City, Barnard Castle and Peterlee last year, providing in-hours urgent dental care for patients.
