does anyone know of a dentist in Barnsley who is accepting new NHS customers ?

Reight. I've been out and come back. I'll field this one.

OK - firstly NHS and Private, what exactly does it mean?
An NHS patient is one who has entered into an NHS contract with a dentist.

This is a standard contract whichever dentist you choose to go to.  It lasts for 15 months, although a new contract starts with each checkup.  It entitles you to any of the list of treatments available on the NHS (cleaning, fillings dentures etc, but not implants, bleach whitening and so on) at prices fixed nationwide by the NHS.  It also has fee exemptions available for Working Families or Disabled Persons Tax Credits, Income based Job Seekers' Allowance and Pregnancy/nursing mothers.  The NHS contributes some (or all if you're exempt) of the dentist's fee.

A Private contract is a contract between you and a dentist - there is no third party (ie the NHS) involved, hence the term "private".  As a result, the fees charged are not standardised in any way - you go, (s)he examines you and gives you a "take it or leave it" estimate.  The only thing governing these fees is, like most other services, competition in the marketplace.  However the chronic shortage of qualified dentists in the UK means competition is not fierce and so prices are poorly controlled.  Meantime, dentists in the main are more worried about controlling workload than increasing income.  By pricing half your list out, you double the time you can spend with each patient without loss of income.

Meantime, the great new system Sir Tony and his cronies have come up with will make it all better.  What will happen now is practices will negotiate with health authorities for a practice budget.  As in "we will see so many patients and you will pay us such an amount per year".  So what happens is the local health authority work out from patients records what we should have collected over the till and top it up each month to what is essentially a salary.  The idea is that, as we are no longer on piecework - ie I get paid more for a checkup and a filling than a checkup alone, we will cut out all the unnecessary treatment carried out under the NHS and free up lots of time to see more patients.  Meantime, our budget will be based on the past year's income so there'll be no pay cuts for dentists.

Just a couple of problems with that - like most busy practices, our practice sees one patient per dentist every 9 minutes.  If you are seen for a checkup and need any treatment, my next free 9 minutes is in January.  So am I, or is any bugger else, doing unnecessary treatment purely to line pockets? No. I can't keep on top of the workload of necessary stuff.  So will demand for my time go down under the new system? No.  However, my pay will.  After the Department of Health's "seasonal adjustment" formula has been applied to last year's figures, I'm 15% down under the new scheme.  So will I be seeing any new NHS patients this year? No will I ****.  I'll be making up the shortfall buying into the booming private sector and charging reasonable fees to protect the future of my business.

I hope this clarifies the difference between NHS and Private and why finding a dentist willing to accept you under NHS contract is currently very difficult.

Which brings me as a final point onto our old friend Oscar.  Got your dentures made by a technician did you? As in someone who is not a dentist? As in someone not qualified to practise dentistry?  Riiight...
I don't want to bring up the past but I seem to recall you have some sort of legal background.  And, to put it mildy, a strong belief in the firmer application of criminal justice.  As such, I think perhaps you might like to look into reporting your guy in Featherstone to the General Dental Council to secure prosecution under the Dentists Act (1928) (as amended) for the illegal practise of dentistry, rather than advertising his services on here.  But that's just my opinion.

Anyway, rant pretty much over for now.

 

RE: LOL

That's the plan Stan.

Bozzy

 

RE: It's amazing looking at her eyes in the monitor

Resilient lass you've got there. Tough cookie

 

Cheers for that Revvie

Top and bottom of it is there just aren't enough dentists.

 

RE: I should write to the hospital

Thanks for that and if I see you in the Outpost I'll try not to jump out at you like last time !!! 

 

RE: Cheers for that Revvie

But of course it's all the dentists fault for being 'expensive'.

I just wish our governing bodies had as much will about them as Dentistry.

 

Maybe the government should focus more on

closing down wanky 'switching the TV over' degrees at shithole northern universities and opening up more dentistry/medical/engineering/plumbing/electrician courses so that students are actually trained in the skills society need.

 

RE: Maybe the government should focus more on

You can't MAKE people be a particular professional. Something this legislation-happy govt seem to be ignorant of.

Dunno about Dentistry but from my perspective, we deal mainly with Primary Care Trusts, and very very much depending who and which one you deal with, is a ******* lottery.

They don't fund Optical services to anything like the remuneration we get from private work. However our governing bodies are so factioned and self protective that they don't battle for our or our patients/customers benefit. So my practice gets about 60 % of what it would from private work for every NHS patient we see.

And we have to like it.

 

RE: Cheers for that Revvie

From the taxpayers' and patient's perspective I fear successive governments have already fecked it over beyond redemption.

The private sector in dentistry is booming because the shortage of dentists has not been addressed for so long. Those dentists who currently see patients under NHS contract do so primarily because it is a system they believe in and not because it is a system treating them (us, should I say) particularly well.  However we are getting increasingly disillusioned.

Meantime, practitioners practising primarily in the private sector have now got it too good for it to ever be cost-effective for a state-funded operation to "buy them back in".

The only answer will be recruitment programmes to bring in denists who qualified in the new EU member states like Czech Republic, Poland, Lithuania etc. to increase competition on current practitioners.

 

Here Here ( or Hear Hear )

Could not have put it better. !!!!!!!

 

RE: Cheers for that Revvie

Our problems stem from the fact Ken Clarke deregulated the 'dispensing' ie selling, of specs so any **** can sell them. But we never emphasised the importance and value of the eye exam so that we've ended up with the spec buying public subsidising the eye exam. And hence we are in a weak position when arguing for a realistic eye exam fee from the DoH.

Don't know about you but all GOC registered staff have to undergo COMPULSORY cet, summat which spotty herberts at Vision Express don't have to, and we have to pay for it.

Smashing.

 

RE: Maybe the government should focus more on

You are right there, Jay. Reduce the number of crap degrees and crap unis then we could give students full grants and the other lot could be earning at McDonalds, three years before they ended up there. All this 'education education education' crap was a government con in raising the 'school' leaving age, which among other things, laundered the unemployment figures.

 

RE: Cheers for that Revvie

Does that mean the opticians at Vision Express aren't qualified ??

 

RE: whats a dental lab

A dental lab is where Dental Technicians work.
They do the bits the patient doesn't need to be there for, under subcontract from a dentist.

ie, I take impressions and bite records for dentures.  The patient leaves the room and the next patient comes in.  And so it goes on until your next appointment when your dentures have magically appeared in my cupboard ready to fit. 

Except it's not magic.  A technician picks up the impressions and records from the surgery, does the manufacturing and delivers the result for fitting.

However, some naughty technicians do all the stages themselves, including those which involve a patient.
It's great, you see, because they don't have to pay the same registration fees to the professional bodies as dentists, they have no liability insurance to pay out for in case things go wrong, and best of all don't even have to pay income tax because the patient pays cash and it can't go through the books because it's all illegal anyway.  So they can do it MUCH cheaper than a dentist can and everyone's a winner.

 

RE: Cheers for that Revvie

Ryanair have opened 4 new routes to Poland fed largely by demand for cheaper dentistry.

 

Not the opticians who look at your eyes

But the dispensing opticians who give you your glasses.

'kin 'ell, I've known Dirk too long. He's filled my head with useless *****.

 

RE: Cheers for that Revvie

The Optometrists will be.

You may struggle to find a Dispensing Optician to help with frame and lens selection. They may all be unqualified staff - or they'll have gone thro' an in house 'training' prog. He said cynically.

 

Is it just me

Or was there a touch of sarcasm in that.

Sort of like getting the bloke who makes crutches to reset your broken leg then.

 

RE: Reight. I've been out and come back. I'll field this one.

i also get my cars serviced by an untrained mechanic who just knows a lot more about cars than most qualified mechanics. I've just had a new bathroom put in by a bloke who has no qualifications but did a superb job from start to finish. I had my denture made by a bloke who knows more about dentures than any dentist i've ever met and he is qualified to make them. Its called common sense. Maybe ypou should try and buy some from somewhere

 

RE: Reight. I've been out and come back. I'll field this one.