For many years now I’ve been talking to colleagues throughout dentistry about ‘the collapse of the NHS’.
People have been jumping ship, getting out and converting to private. Keeping the smallest NHS contract they can or none and many people have now converted their children to private contracts too.
This of course leaves a gaping hole in society where people are underserviced for their NHS dentistry and where the government (whichever colour) are able to say, ‘but we’ve invested this, that or the other’.
In those conversations I’ve had over the years, I adopted the stance that we had to let things break entirely before they could be fixed again and perhaps, we’re heading towards that point.
Reading the Times this morning it would appear that we’re not a million miles away from absolute public finance collapse in that regard.
When we have to trim 20% off the NHS budget, we’ll have to trim more than 50% or 100% off the NHS dentistry budget.
Maybe a knight in shining armour will come along and add the 3 billion to the existing budget which would allow us to fix the situation for the people who need it the most, but I can’t say that I am particularly convinced that is likely.
The other alternative, the nuclear alternative is that NHS dentistry basically collapses.
If our current prime minister is unable to access the overseas workers to staff NHS dentistry where will they come from?
If her new austerity measures by stealth or otherwise cut the budget for NHS dentistry what will we do then?
When society starts to collapse like this it will probably be up to society to fix it and I believe that there will be a growing groundswell of healthcare professionals in dentistry who decide to try and fix it themselves.
This will probably come in the form of people who’ve done well in dentistry giving something back with no thought for their own gain.
Imagine every single dentist in the UK deciding to do a day a week in some sort of parallel NHS just to help the people who need it the most.
When someone’s brave enough to suggest and start to design this drop me an email.
I’d happily be involved.
Blog Post Number - 3222
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