Dental Practitioners

EDM number 126 in 1994-95, proposed by Frank Cook on 24/11/1994.

That this House congratulates dental practitioners for maintaining exemplary standards of professional care since the inception of the National Health Service; but notes with considerable concern that the consequences of the full implementation of Her Majesty's Government's proposals as laid out in the Green Paper, Improving NHS Dentistry, could well be the reduction in volume and throughput of general work causing immediate increases in waiting lists, all this resulting from possible adoption of the Government's preferred proposal for sessional payments, financial ruin of those dentists having a practice with high overheads and a heavy commitment to NHS clientele, widespread redundancies within ancillary staff f grades, reduction of general dental services to a bare minimum should the ring-fencing of dental funds be removed as seems likely, greatly increased pressures on dentists to adopt the course of action resisted by the vast majority of the profession to date, namely the accelerated move towards private practice, and further loss of morale throughout all grades of dental care workers, who, having coped remarkably well with the many changes introduced hitherto, are now faced with the onerous task of either introducing an invidious purchaser/provider model for remuneration or applying the untried, untested and patently flawed sessional payment scheme; and therefore urges Her Majesty's Government to allow a period of stability to elapse to permit the profession to cope more adequately with changes of the past and prepare more rationally for those of the future.

This motion has been signed by a total of 44 MPs.