Two years

It often seems that life never stands still, and UK Dentistry is far from an exception to that. Among the things going on at the present are the NHS Dental Pilots, with the current issue of Dental Update containing a paper by Tajinder Sihra and Len D'Cruz outlining the process of the pilots, which are intended to inform the Department of Health regarding what the new NHS Dental Contract should look like. Speaking with some of those who are involved in these pilots suggests acceptance of the type of dental thinking that these pilots are intended to achieve among their participants and, as a result, the way that patients are treated, but with widespread misgivings about how long the patient assessment (the Oral Health Assessment)(OHA) actually takes, this being confirmed in the paper at around 30 minutes. This has led, in the dentists with whom I have spoken, to an increase in the time spent with patients, not a bad thing, but with the knock-on effect of appointment books being filled very far in advance. Perhaps it is time to have a rethink and consider something which has already been validated, its reproducibility confirmed and which takes less than 10 minutes of dentists' time, the Oral Health Index,1 originally described in 1995. This was successfully adapted by Mike Busby and others at Denplan to produce the Oral Health Score,2 which has been used in millions of dental examinations by Denplan dentists and which has recently been further adapted to incorporate risk. While it may not collect the volume of information that comes with the OHA, it is a most useful tool which takes up substantially less of (expensive) dentists' time. If the aim of the pilots is to improve access, then that cannot happen if dentists take 30 minutes for an examination, even if that is at substantially greater time intervals than the patients' favourite of six months.