Sascha Burnham, a woman from Barnstaple, North Devon, had to remove her broken tooth herself because she couldn’t find an NHS dentist.
She said that after the tooth cracked and the pain was unbearable, she bought a ceramic filling material online to temporarily fill the hole and pulled out the broken part with tweezers.
Ms Burnham’s former dentist has left the Braunton clinic, and she tried to make an appointment in Minehead but found that there were no NHS places available. She lamented that dental services have become “a luxury rather than a necessity” now.
Ms Burnham is currently on leave due to health problems and was quoted up to £3,000 by a private clinic, which is far beyond her affordability. She is one of many residents who have asked North Devon MP Ian Roome for help.
She said: “The ceramic filling materials bought online are okay for small holes, but if the tooth hole is large or the tooth is broken, it doesn’t work at all.” In the end, she used tweezers to pull out the broken tooth, and the sharp root left scratched her tongue, so she had to use sandpaper to polish it.
The woman said that this situation made her very frustrated because she had always paid attention to oral health and visited the dentist regularly before the epidemic.
Last week, Ian Roome mentioned at the Prime Minister’s Question in Parliament that five North Devon residents who could not find NHS dentists had reported to him that they had to use pliers and simple tools purchased online to extract their teeth. He asked the Prime Minister: “How will the Prime Minister respond to these people? When will the government end this dental crisis?”
In response, the Prime Minister said that the government is planning to increase 700,000 emergency and routine dental appointments, reform dental contracts, and recruit more dentists and newly graduated dentists to ensure that they practice in the NHS for at least a period of time.
He stressed: “The legacy left by the Conservatives is that a quarter of British adults have difficulty accessing NHS dental services, and tooth decay has become the main reason for hospitalization for children aged 5 to 9. We are working hard to solve this problem.”
Mr. Roome, chairman of the North Devon Dental Steering Group, later told local media that although the promise to increase the number of appointments sounds good, these goals will be difficult to achieve in North Devon and other places without solving the labor shortage and contract problems in the dental industry.
“Clinics are short of people, dentists are withdrawing from the NHS, and more and more children and adults are unable to get basic dental services. Emergency care is important, but NHS dentists must be retained through reasonable incentives, otherwise they will fall into a vicious cycle for many years.”
He called on the government to take clear and urgent measures to prevent more people from turning to dangerous “self-help” dental treatment.