Dr Sami Butt, 39, owner of S3 Dental & Facial Aesthetics practice situated in Haywards Heath, East Sussex, gave a brutally honest interview in which he criticised the Government’s response and attitude towards solving the current backlog of NHS patients.
A not so talked about product of the pandemic has been the catastrophic backlog of NHS dental patients coupled with the loss of NHS dentists. Last year alone the NHS saw over 2000 dentists leave and go into private practice.
The Government’s response to this crisis was to spend 50 million pounds on NHS dentistry, however, Dr Butt thinks this is not as generous as it seems, he said “That is just a spin, I feel really strongly about it, because that money was not new money, it was money that was being taken out of existing dentists not hitting their NHS contracts”.
Dr Butt had a scathing review of the Government’s initial lack of response towards coming to an agreement on a new NHS contract, which, is the requirement of NHS patients that dentists must see in order to receive their funding. He said ” The Government doesn’t have clue, fundamentally,… The week the pandemic hit I was having conversations with advanced people within the NHS… post covid we’ve been told that’s been scrapped and we have to go back to an unfair way of working”.
There has been no word on whether a new, realistic long-term contract will be drawn up, possibly forcing S3 Dental to go exclusively private.
