Just Over 70 Percent Of Children In England See An NHS Dentist

Main Category: Dentistry
Article Date: 03 Dec 2007 - 1:00 PDT

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Just over 70 per cent of all children in England have seen an NHS dentist in the last two years, a report for the Information Centre for health and social care (The IC) reveals.

The report; NHS Dental Statistics for England, Quarter 1, June 2007; showed 54.9 per cent (27.9 million) of the entire population was estimated to have been seen in the two years leading up to 30 June 2007.

Of those, 7.8 million were aged 17 or under - 70.7 per cent of all children.

NHS dentists saw 50.5 per cent of all adults (20.1 million) during the same period, which covered the launch of the new commissioning and contractual arrangements for NHS dentistry on 1 April 2006.

The report, which considers NHS dental activity in England and includes analysis of the number of courses of treatment, found the proportion of people seen varied by SHA area.

The highest proportion of adults seen (59.5 per cent) was in the North East SHA area and the lowest proportion (40.0 per cent) in the South Central SHA area.

The highest proportion of children seen (73.9 per cent) was also in the North East SHA, while London SHA saw the lowest proportion (65.5 per cent).

During the first quarter of 2007/08 NHS dentists carried out:

- 8.9 million courses of treatment (CoT)
- 18.6 million units of dental activity (UDA)

For a full version of the latest report, which is accompanied by an easy-to-use electronic factsheet, which allows users to compare the results for any one PCT against averages for the parent Strategic Health Authority (SHA), and for England as a whole; visit here.

Notes:

The Information Centre (The IC) is England's authoritative, independent source of health and social care information. It works with more than 300 health and social care providers nationwide to provide the facts and figures that help the NHS and social services run effectively. Its role is to collect data, analyse it and convert it into useful information which helps providers improve their services and supports academics, researchers, regulators and policymakers in their work.

The IC also produces a wide range of statistical publications each year across a number of areas including: primary care, health and lifestyles, screening, hospital care, population and geography, social care and workforce and pay statistics.

The NHS Business Service Authority's Dental Services Division (DSD) is the source of data for this report. The IC has responsibility for analysing and publishing these data.

The report covers NHS dental work, much of which is undertaken by 'high street dentists', and does not cover private work carried out by dentists. It covers all activity (excluding orthodontic work) carried out in the first quarter of 2007/08; the second year of the new contractual arrangements for NHS dentists.

In an improvement to previous quarterly dental statistics reports produced by The IC, this report contains a change to previous methodology for measuring dental activity. Activity is now measured as the number of courses of treatment that end within any given quarter of the year. Previously, it had been measured as the number of activity report forms processed by the DSD within that quarter, of which some forms may have related to courses of treatment carried out in earlier quarters. This change means that activity data in this report cannot be compared to the quarterly reports published during 2006/07. Information on the number of patients seen is unaffected by this change.

The Information Centre for health and social care

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