One of my friends was at a dinner recently. Sitting beside him on either side were two dentists who were 25 years old, one on his left and one on his right.
He's involved in dentistry but not a dentist; he just works in the industry.
During the meal and while talking to these guys who had been qualified for 2 or 3 years, it became apparent that they were never going to stay working in NHS dentistry if possible.
They were both friends and pretty clever for their age, so they're setting a pathway for the next 5 years to upskill and get out of the NHS treadmill system; not surprising; it's not a new story; this is how the world goes.
While I'm not connected politically particularly well, I have also paid attention to the government's potential solution to the NHS manpower crisis, which is being made worse by stories like the one above.
One of the things that was going to happen is we were going to import dentists from Kerala in India to fill the gaps in the NHS and to bring them into the practice and their sponsorship arrangements, but apparently, the new immigration legislation will cap that, stop it, because trying to stop people coming through the borders is now apparently more important than trying to fill dentists workplaces.
So, what does this do to healthcare, what will happen over the next few years, and how will it be affected by changing perspectives?
Well, the situation looks like this.
I had a video call with one of my patients 2 nights ago. I want to send him for some blood tests because he's had some problems with implant treatment, and I'm concerned there might be some underlying issues.
As I've written in this blog post many times before, I know the most extraordinary physician who looked after my thyroid problems and some other things, as well as other members of my family. For about £350, you can get an hour-long consultation after having had all your bloods taken for an extraordinary screen, which pretty much measures everything you could ever measure and usually, the test you won't likely get to your GP unless there's something catastrophically wrong.
On the call, I started to say to my patient that I could send him to his GP, but I didn't get the P out; he had already said no. I said to him, "ok, I have another alternative". In between that sentence, he answered yes.
What's happened here is that he trusts me, and he knows that I'm offering him an alternative outside of the NHS. He's unhappy with his NHS practice, and he's taking the alternative.
It's a staggering set of affairs; people's perceptions and attitudes towards accepting care outside of the NHS have changed extraordinarily over the last while.
Bupa Dental and Bupa's parent company, in general, have identified the fact that self-pay treatments are now up to 25% of the overall healthcare market. That's people who are not insured, just signing up to have private healthcare (like the knee that I had done a few weeks ago).
So, add all these pieces of information together, and you will see the direction of travel.
We will not have enough dentists, and the ones that we do will not work in the NHS unless something catastrophic changes, and it won't.
We will need to upskill as heavily as we can in order to get into the private market to provide the treatments that we want in a market that will become more and more competitive.
But next, patients will flock to that market because they'll understand that they can't get the care they want (or any care at all), and so the shift continues to move across.
Are you ready?
Blog Post Number - 4179