A victim of DIY dentistry has said she was forced to pull out several of her own teeth with pliers as she faced a three-year wait for NHS care at a practice 50 miles from her home.
Caroline Pursey, 63, of Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire, said she took drastic action when she found she could no longer eat, as her tooth pain had become unbearable.
Ms Pursey could no longer afford to have her teeth taken out by her regular dentist after his practice went private, leading her to seek out an NHS dentist.
The earliest appointment she was given at a dentist 50-miles from her home was not for another three years.
She told i: “The teeth were loose, it was painful and they were growing on each other, so I couldn’t eat at all. I used pliers and I just pulled them out. I’ve pulled four teeth out now.”
Ms Pursey said she has been left with gaps in her mouth as a result of being unable to access a dentist, which has made it difficult for her to find a job.
“I’ve been to job interviews but as soon as people see me and I open my mouth, it’s out the door because I have not got any teeth,” she said.
More than 80 per cent of dentists have reported cases of DIY dentistry, with patients pulling their own teeth out and fixing their crowns with superglue, a survey by the British Dental Association has found.
The Government on Wednesday announced its plan to fix the NHS dentistry crisis and reduce the backlog in which four in five NHS practices in England stop accepting new adult patients.
The plan includes a £200m funding boost which seeks to create 2.5m new appointments.
The additional funding aims to provide 240 dentists up to £20,000 to work in “dental deserts” – underserved areas with a scarcity of available appointments – for up to three years.
Dentists will also be offered a “new patient” payment of between £15-£50, depending on treatment need, to treat around a million people who have not seen an NHS dentist in two years or more.
Health and Social Care Secretary Victoria Atkins said: “Dentistry is a priority for this government. I know from my experience representing a rural and coastal constituency in Lincolnshire how frustrating it is for people who cannot get a dentist appointment, especially after the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on dentistry.
“We have seen big improvements over the past year, but now we are going much further. I’m determined to deliver faster, simpler and fairer access to NHS dentistry for patients – and this plan will help anyone who has not been able to see a dentist in the past two years to do so.”
However, industry experts said queues witnesses in Bristol this week – where hundreds of people lined up after a practice opened up its books for NHS patients – would be repeated around the country if dental practices were able to take on new NHS patients.
Eddie Crouch, chairman of the British Dental Association, said that demand for health service dental care is so high that the same scenario would be repeated elsewhere.
“In my own city, in Birmingham, if they opened a new service like that and they asked people to come and register or come along and make appointments, there would probably be a queue just like that,” he said. “We’ve got 12 million people looking for access to NHS dentistry. So what that (queue) visualises is just the sad state the service is currently in.
“There are towns across this country where any new practice opening would see a repeat of scenes we saw in Bristol. The police might want to thank the Government that budgets are so tight we won’t be seeing many grand openings any time soon.”
