Scottish Parliament Dental treatment

Joe FitzPatrick Scottish National Party

Two points were made about the BDA. One was on workforce, which I will come to shortly, and the other was on prevention. Prevention is an area where we are having substantial success across Scotland. The childsmile programme is making a real difference. It helps to make sure that children know how to brush their teeth properly and provides fluoride varnish applications. We will be announcing the next stage of that under the community challenge fund of the oral health improvement plan, and we will be announcing which projects will be taken forward that are aimed at reducing further the oral health inequalities among children.

On the other area, a challenge that we no longer have is people being unable to access an NHS dentist—very few people cannot access one. When this Government took over in 2007, huge numbers of people were unable to access an NHS dentist, and we have managed to turn that around. Sometimes, it is important to acknowledge progress where it has been made, so we should thank our dental colleagues for rising to the challenge and making sure that people can, in the first place, access NHS dental practices.

Last week, I had a chat with the BDA, and one of the challenging areas is the shortage of anaesthetic consultants, which leads to a number of the waiting times figures. Even there, since 2006, we have increased the numbers of anaesthetic consultants by 41.7 per cent—moving from 549 up to 778.

I am in no way suggesting that everything is rosy. I accept that some of the waits and more challenging cases are unacceptable, particularly when we are talking about children, who are often in pain. We need to continue to do better around that. We are making a difference, and the waiting times improvement plan is designed to make it even better