NHS Dental Care at MK Dental Care

We offer both Private and NHS Dental Care. We offer High Quality Private Treatment to all patients. Our aim is to provide High Quality Dental Care and Outstanding Value For Money.

We offer NHS Dental Care to children only. Our NHS Dental Care for our children is the same high quality as we offer our private adult patients.

We decided that we did not want to offer two levels of care. So we decided to stop NHS care for Adults and concentrate and focus all our NHS resources on our children.

We decided we will offer the same level of care to our child patients as our adults:

    The same materials

    The same techniques

    The same written treatment plans

In other words Private Standards of Care for our NHS Children.

We get calls on a regular basis from dentists who read this webpage and say we should not "Slag off" the NHS, but the facts speak for themselves. I have never found a dentist who could contradict what we say. Why? Because what we say is true even if it is unpalatable.

NHS dentists are not allowed to criticize the NHS, and we believe that this is a major reason why the NHS is so poor. Simply put, NHS staff are afraid to speak out. Dentists are not allowed to say that private treatment is better than NHS care. Likewise this has been a major reason why the standards in the NHS are often so poor.

In Milton Keynes the vast majority of dentists are either stopping working in the NHS altogether or dramatically reducing their commitment.

On the 1st April 2006 NHS registration for Dental patient finished completely at every dental surgery in the country.

The new contract for dentists is a joke, poorly thought out; a recipe for disaster. The new NHS charges mean that a simple check-up and single surface filling which used to cost about £10 will cost over £40.

Our Views on the way the NHS Dental Care Payments (called UDA's "Units of Dental Activity") will be be made. The UDA's will be counted by the government.

A dentist, with a great sense of humour, illustrates above how the new system will work.

Under the new NHS Dental Care system dentists will be paid by measuring their dental activity and unlike the previous system the new payments are directly related to paper work rather than treatment. Dentists will be paid exactly the same for 6 fillings as they will for 1 filling. This will create an unacceptable conflict of interest between the clinical needs of the patient and the needs of the dentist not to go bankrupt.

There are lots of lies and half truths being told about NHS Dental Care. Tony Blair told a bare face lie when he said every body would be able to see an NHS dentist. There is a culture of lies and half truths when it come to NHS Dental Care and the patients are the ones who suffer.

I remember reading about so called new NHS dental practices opening in Milton Keynes, yet a quick look at Yellow Pages reveals the reality. This comes as no surprise to those of us who keep their eyes and ears open.

A Dentist who opens a typical new "NHS" practice will be given well over £1,000,000 for the first 3 years. Then after 3 years, hey presto, the practice gets rid of it's NHS patients. Whilst I have listened to many local dentists talk about their plans to stop providing NHS Dental Care and go private, I have yet to hear anyone say that they plan to remain as an "NHS" dentist in the long term.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating. The only way to make increase your profit if you are an NHS dental practice is to cut back on costs, in fact it is worse than that, because dentists are expected to see more patients every year without any extra money. So for a practice to simply stay still they would have to cut back on wages, training the cost of equipment or the cost of materials.

You might ask: well not every dentist wants to increase their profit, well the same problem applies if the dentist need to replace their x-ray machine the only way to do it is to make cut backs somewhere else (wages, materials, training etc). Future NHS payments are not flexible in the way they are at the moment. This is why dentists are leaving in droves!! Of course they could stay and simply reduce their costs (cheaper materials etc).

Patients are not stupid, they simply want their dentist to be honest and upfront with them, and they want their dentist to offer the best available treatment.

I am happy to say that whilst the dentists providing NHS Dental Care try their best, often at great personal cost, the facts are that the quality of care that is available privately is simply not available to NHS patients. 

For example, If I lost my front tooth and wanted the treatment which because I am a dentist, I know is best for me. I would have to go to one of the private dentists in Milton Keynes, simply because there is no place I could get the treatment on the NHS, it is simply not available. The powers that be say that because in theory it should be available we can't say that some treatments (often the best option) are not available on the NHS, but we all know that in practice they are not. 

We stopped providing NHS Dental Care because we believe that the NHS no longer stands for high quality. The NHS no longer offers the best options. In fact in many peoples mind and experience the NHS is associated with Long Waiting Lists, Dirty Hospitals, Shortage of Doctors, and denial of best treatment options.

We believe that we are part of the community we care for and that is why we continue to provide NHS Care for children. 

All Dental Practices do not offer the same Value for Money or the same Quality of Care. Patients know this and so do other Dentists.

The NHS has decided that the future of NHS Dentistry is in expanding clinics that offer one off dental care (they will not accept patients for continuing care) and in clinics where the treatment is provided not by dentists but by non dentists. Rather than expand the Specialist Dental Services they are contracting them. This is accountant led Dental Care rather than clinically led.

Choosing a dentist is like choosing a house, a school or a car.  Much the same considerations apply. We know we will not appeal to everybody nor do we wish to. We realise that some patients will make a choice solely on the basis of cost.

We conducted a survey recently of new patients who rang us enquiring about joining our practice. Many patients who rang up simply asked were we taking on NHS patients? to which the answer was yes, because we do actually take on children, and we followed up their questions with questions of our own about exactly what they wanted from their dentist.

Quite quickly it became apparent that almost all patients who had to pay for their treatment and requested NHS treatment were looking for cheap dental care, in much the same way as one would buy the Value products at Tesco's or the cheaper cuts of meat. 

Originally we thought that we would actually lose a lot of patients if we stopped taking NHS patients and it is true we lost some of our existing patients and some patients who wanted to come to our practice. However this was not always bad news. The existing patients who left were disproportionately patients who had missed lots of appointments or failed to complete their reatment. When we followed up the new patients who made enquiries the majority who did not make or keep their appointment responded to the question about why they wanted NHS treatment with the answer "because its cheaper". Of course there were exceptions but they were few and far between.

We now realise that actually by refusing to offer NHS to paying adults we actually sifted out exactly the sort of patients we didn't want anyway.

They were the sort of patients who wanted to come for a filling but didn't want to see the hygienist. 

I sometimes go to Tesco's or Waitrose or wherever and see their trifles are 1/2 price because they are on their last sell by date. I sometimes buy them and eat them up, naughty perhaps but lovely and great value. At the check out I sometimes see people buying own brand Kellogg's Frosties or Kellogg's Coco Pops. I have done it myself and ended up throwing them away because my kids will not eat rubbish (they leave that to me with the trifle). 

Choosing NHS treatment is like choosing the shops own brand or value product we do it because either we hope it will be the same, but deep down we know that what we really want is the real brand.

The Governments response to the difficulty in getting NHS treatment has been The Dental Access Centres. 

Basically they have poured millions into new clinics and promised a walk in service. The reality is somewhat different. Firstly it is not a walk in centre. Often there are no dentists working, and patients are asked to ring back the next day. They no longer offer a same day emergency service, Patients in pain are being turned away, despite the promises that where made publicly.

To be fair to the Dental Access Centres (DAC) they have been welcomed by many dentists including ourselves. Before they arrived patients who were drunk, or on "illegal drugs" or simply violent and threatening, had nowhere to go, and this was a major problem. All patients deserve care and the fact that most dentists can't provide treatment for patients who are high etc does not change the fact that these people have rights too. The Dental Access Centres are to be congratulated for offering an open door and warm welcome to patients such as drug addicts and to put it politely others that most dentists are too busy to treat.

Have a full look Around Our Practice
	At MKDentalCare we want our patients to feel welcomed by our receptionist who sits behind the lovely solid beech reception desk. The waiting room is decorated in warm colours. There is comfortable  seating, with couple of high back chairs too. There is a TV which we find most patients prefer.
	David's surgery is large and bright, with the latest equipment. This surgery is always admired by dentists when they visit the surgery, as everything is close at hand, yet hidden away. Cross infection control was at the heart of our surgery planning.