Dental care in 'abysmal' state due to lack of staff

SPECIAL NEEDS patients are experiencing delays of up to a year for dental treatment due to staff shortages, according to a leading expert.

Speaking in advance of the Public Dental Surgeons Group annual seminar which starts tomorrow, incoming president Dr Jane Renehan spoke of a crisis in the provision of dental services to the public.

Dr Renehan said that existing staffing and resources were “abysmal” and claimed the situation was worsening as vacancies remained unfilled and increasing numbers of surgeons left the service because of difficult working conditions and poor resourcing.

"When every working day is an exercise in crisis management, there's something wrong with the system," Dr Renehan told The Irish Times.

“I would suggest we are employing less than half of the public dental surgeons we need even for a basic level of service and because of the scarcity of specialist anaesthetic services; we’re looking at delays of over a year for many special needs patients seeking dental treatment in different parts of the country.”

The Public Dental Surgeons Group has called on the Health Service Executive (HSE) for public dental services to be exempted from the moratorium on recruitment.

According to the organisation, which is part of the Irish Dental Association (IDA), the representative body for dentists in Ireland, fewer than 200 surgeons are currently employed full-time in the public service which provide free services to vulnerable adults and children.

An agreement reached between the IDA, HSE and the trade union Impact in 1999 called for the deployment of 350 full-time surgeons.

A number of dental disease surveys have indicated that patients with special needs tend to have poorer oral health than those in the general population.

In particular, they suffer from significantly higher levels of gum disease and loss of teeth and are more likely to need additional assistance while undergoing treatment.

“Salaried staff in the public sector used to primarily look after people with special needs and children.

“However, over the past few years, the number of people seeking treatment has grown because people are living longer and as a result of us beginning to cater for individuals in nursing homes and long-stay geriatric care,” she said.

“We simply do not have adequate resources or staff at present to deal with the increase in people requiring treatment,” she added.

Dr Renehan’s comments come just months after the IDA advised that poorer people and children were suffering from new cutbacks in the health sector.

In a submission published in July, the IDA said the provision of dental services had been “significantly and adversely affected” by the HSE’s recruitment embargo and called for the appointment of front-line clinical dentists to be “prioritised”.

The document also warned that the administration of the Dental Treatment Services Scheme (DTSS), was “seriously under-funded and on the verge of collapse in many areas”.

The Public Dental Surgeons Group annual seminar begins in Wexford tomorrow and continues until Friday