Dentistry And Mad Max – How It Will All Start?
NewsPosted by: Dental Design 11th March 2022
A few years from now, in a not-too-distant, dystopian future, the UK’s dental profession is torn apart by infighting between the nation’s private and NHS dentists.
Bands of lawless, desperate general dental practitioners roam the devastated countryside, stripping every city, town, and village of patients who will help them pay the practice rent and cover staff costs. These desperados pillage nice composite wherever they find it and loot any shiny metal alginate spatulas and carvers that take their fancy, despite the fact they have had the owner’s name inexpertly scratched on them with an inverted cone.
Only one man stands between a functioning dental service and the profession tearing itself apart… and that man… is… Sajid Javid.
If you think that’s more than a little far-fetched – it is. I mean, Sajid seems a nice bloke, but really? However, there is undoubtedly some division appearing to be opening up in the UK dental profession.
I’ve been more than a little disappointed over the past few weeks, by the hint of hostility that appears to have been lobbed at NHS practitioners by members of the private sector.
Admittedly, the criticism has only come from a few sources, but the resentment towards NHS practitioners appears to be real, and I have pondered if these cracks are the first signs of a catastrophic schism opening between private and NHS GDPs.
I spotted the first indication that all is not well on Twitter a little while ago, when someone, who I assume was a private dentist, tweeted that it must be a shock for NHS dentists to “Actually have to work for a living” after “Staying at home for 6 months on full tax payer funded income and getting full pay for doing 20% for another year.”
The really disparaging part was when he went on to suggest that “The biggest problem now is having to close down ebay (sic) selling your free PPE.”
Not surprisingly, a pile-on ensued (and yes, I too was in the fray) and the dentist’s tweet was subsequently deleted. He blocked accounts as well, including mine. The GDP’s tweet was disappointing to say the least. I’ve viewed his Twitter feed since from my personal account and we otherwise share similar views. I firmly believe that if he hadn’t posted his view, we could have been friends (sad, tearful emoji face).
I really don’t think I’ve had my head in the sand, but up to that point, I really hadn’t seen any comments from NHS practitioners running-down their private colleagues. The general vibe seeming to be ‘Good luck to them, some of us will maybe join you later.’
Now yes, that was one isolated tweet, but the small fissure between private and NHS threatened expanding to the dimensions of the Grand Canyon when a renowned dental journal published a letter from a dentist who said he was sick of reading how his ‘NHS dentist’ colleagues moaned about their burden of work.
The author – a private dentist since 1990, apparently – took up the theme that NHS GDPs had to only provide 20% of their contracted UDAs. He then extrapolated abstractly, to say that the value of each UDA was thus increased to 500% when “Those working on the frontline” of the pandemic were only offered a ‘paltry’ 1%.
The dentist then went on to say that the past two years had been a financially golden period of ‘NHS’ (his quotation marks) dentistry.
Fair enough, I wasn’t in practice when Covid-19 became popular, but I don’t know any NHS dentists who would ACTUALLY be better off as a result of the pandemic – financially, or otherwise.
I also don’t personally know ANY dentists who took furlough payments. Most NHS GDPs I know were busy triaging either at home or behind reception in the practice, trying to cope mentally with the bizarre and counter-intuitive instruction to fix toothache by following the Three A’s, without popping an essential sub-arachnoid blood vessel in the process.
I pretty much live my life vicariously through Twitter and Facebook dental groups these days and I have yet to witness any derogatory posts aimed at private dental practitioners originating from their NHS counterparts.
The general feeling seems to be ‘good on them’ – the consensus considering that private dentists made the right choice in getting out of NHS dentistry, particularly in light of the ever-receding prospect of a new General Dental Service contract. In fact, a number of the practitioners I follow have indicated that they will reluctantly hand back their NHS contracts to go, if not fully, at least partially private, in the coming financial year.
Let me be clear, I have nothing against private dentistry at all. All I know is that I had neither the confidence nor entrepreneurial skills to carry a private conversion. I also carried a career-long (and probably, misguided belief) that I owed the taxpayer my services after being one of the lucky students in the 1980s who received both a full grant and didn’t have to pay any tuition fees.
But I struggle to find where the resentment shown by these few private practitioners comes from. Can they REALLY be jealous of their NHS colleagues receiving support during the early part of the pandemic? After all, dentists on the Nash endure the endless chasing of bizarre targets (“You need six fillings, but we’ll do it for the price of one”) and suffer clawback if they don’t hit them. That is hardly the Life of Riley.
Yes, all dentists face backlogs and financial pressures, but the common enemy is surely not GDP’s on the other side of the fence, but the growing numbers of litigation solicitors and their avaricious pursuit of frivolous dental claims – surely Mad Max made flesh.
So PLEASE, let’s all play nicely and don’t be mean to Sajid.
About the author
Ollie Jupes is the pseudonym of a former NHS dentist. He monitors dentistry on Twitter as @DentistGoneBadd
