Letter

Dental pain

Dear healthmatters — Thanks for the latest issue. As usual it is to the point, if a little narrow in its subject matter. Also too repetitive and too full of doctors, nurses and hospitals.

The other difficulty is that the magazine is trying to reach a political spectrum which no longer exists, and I don’t know the answer to this problem. The Left can be described as a ‘good ideas’ workshop, but because it has no politics then it can only be an irritant.

Turning to dentistry, from which I have now semi-retired, it is now in a long period of ‘consultation’ following the government’s green paper. It has taken four years and three reports to get this far. But the green paper is just rubbish. It is set to make NHS dentists even more unhappy and it hopes to continue the drift to private care.

One of the reports — by the Nuffield Foundation in 1993 — is worth reading. The dental report of the Commons Select Committee came to monetrist conclusions, as did the Bloomfield Report. The four Labour MPs on the commons select committee signed their report, which gives 100 per cent support for private dentistry. They should be asked to write a few hundred words on why they did not present a minority report.