Nearly 5,000 children and young people in New Zealand are waiting for dental surgery to remove severely decayed teeth, with some enduring ongoing pain while they wait.
Health NZ figures show that as of September, 4,866 children and young people were on the dental surgery waiting list. That number has risen by about 900 over the past two years.
The New Zealand Dental Association says the situation reflects a long-term and worsening problem. Its director of policy, Dr Robin Whyman, told RNZ’s Nine to Noon that while the waiting list has fallen slightly in the past year, this was only due to significant effort across the dental sector, partly driven by government targets to reduce wait times.
Dr Whyman said raw waiting list numbers do not fully capture the scale of the issue. A better measure, he said, is the number of children needing dental surgery per 1,000 people.
“In 1990 it was about one per thousand,” he said. “By the end of 2019, the last time research was done, it was about four per thousand. That’s a four-fold increase over 30 years.”
Many of the children on the list require treatment under general anaesthetic. This is often because they are very young and need multiple baby teeth removed, or because they have disabilities or behavioural challenges that make dental procedures difficult.
“Some children are definitely in pain,” Dr Whyman said. “We see cases where they have to go to their GP for pain relief and antibiotics, then return to the dental service for further management.”
Dental services are often forced to reshuffle waiting lists to prioritise children whose pain becomes more severe, making pain management a major challenge.
While there is now greater acceptance of the safety of general anaesthetic, Dr Whyman said longer waits are mainly being driven by rising tooth decay, reduced access to early dental care, and workforce shortages.
New Zealand’s community oral health service aims to enrol children soon after birth, but staffing shortages have made it difficult to provide regular check-ups and timely treatment.
Wait times worsened significantly after the Covid-19 pandemic, which coincided with a wave of retirements among dental health therapists. Many have been replaced by oral health therapists, who have a broader scope of practice and are spread across a wider age range, including older teenagers and adults.
“The access problems were building well before Covid,” Dr Whyman said. “But the pandemic made things much worse.”
He said childhood dental decay is strongly linked to diet, particularly sugary foods and drinks, and is not evenly distributed across society.
“Children don’t control their food environment,” he said. “It’s shaped by family circumstances and what the food industry produces and promotes.”
Health NZ said reducing dental surgery wait times is part of a wider plan to cut elective surgery delays. Measures include expanding dedicated theatre sessions for paediatric dental cases, such as evening “twilight” sessions at Auckland Hospital and a monthly Saturday clinic in Whangārei.