Dental crisis

I'm lucky to have had free NHS dental treatment for all my life, as private treatment costs many times what the NHS charges. I can get a routine check-up, X rays and a scale and polish for £25.80 ($33), plus fillings or root canal work for £70.70 ($90).

Unfortunately the British government is trying to privatise dentistry and is deliberately paying dentists less than the actual cost of treatment so that (very reluctantly) they give up on the NHS and go private to get a decent income.

Our first NHS dentist in Belfast retired and sold her practice to another dentist who promptly went private. Our second NHS dental practice has just announced that the whole practice of seven dentists is going private from the end of July. We've found a new NHS dentist, but how long will it be before he goes private as well?

Our current dentist's charges for private treatment will be hefty - for example, new patient examination £75 ($95), fillings £80 to £120 ($102 to $152). There's no dental insurance, only a scheme to spread your payments rather than pay them upfront.

The situation is worse in England, where many people can't even find an NHS dentist willing to take on new patients. Or an available dentist is so far away (like 50 miles), it's impractical to sign on with them.

There are reports of people in horrendous pain extracting their own teeth, or using over-the-counter emergency fillings, such is their desperation. But the government does nothing to make NHS treatment more viable for dentists and is happy to let NHS dentistry (the proud achievement of Health Secretary Aneurin Bevan in 1948) slowly collapse.

Operation blues

Countless cancelled operations in the UK's health service are prolonging misery and pain for thousands of people. The latest cause is cock-ups over surgical instruments.

Surgeons say they are more and more likely to be broken, missing or dirty. In which case an entire surgical team, ready to operate, has to down tools and tell the patient to go home again.

Yet again the government has handed over a job to private businesses which are failing to do the work properly. Ward cleaning was farmed out and still isn't up to standard. Many nursing posts were farmed out to agencies, again causing lots of complaints. Now it's providing and decontaminating surgical instruments that's being screwed up.

The politicians are still besotted with the idea that private firms can do the job better than their own NHS staff, even though they've been proved wrong repeatedly.

So people like Helen R. in Leeds, whose hip operation has been postponed twice because the surgeon didn't have the right instruments, is angry and upset at such elementary blunders.

"This is supposed to be the 21st century. We're supposed to have sorted these things out" she said.

There are already tens of thousands of cancelled operations because of sick staff, vacant posts, funding problems or emergencies taking priority. A lot of operating theatres aren't even used in the evenings or at weekends.

Now even more people are finding they have to put up with that excruciating pain or disabling condition for longer than they thought because of the results of political dogma.

Clearly the politicians could do with a bit of emergency brain surgery themselves.
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The BBC reports today (Sunday) that there are 10 times more deaths across the UK from the superbug clostridium difficile among over 65-year-olds than in any other country in the world. And one person dies every hour in our hospitals from this deadly infection.