In Focus: dental insurance Health Insurance and Protection Magazine
Unlike with many other forms of health insurance, there is clearly no great educational problem to be solved with regard to either employers or employees. Professor Jimmy Steele’s independent review of dentistry, published in June last year, highlighted a strong public perception that NHS dentists are hard to come by.
Jill Davies, chief executive at Westfield Health, says: “Since Labour’s radical overhaul of the NHS dental system in 2006 the industry has been the focus of much controversy. Changes such as the introduction of the three tiered pricing bands for treatment and the scrapping of the registration system were designed to attract more dentists to the NHS but led to an estimated 1,000 of them walking out.”
While the latest figures from the NHS Information Centre show that the same number of patients in England accessed NHS dental care between 2008-2009 and the two years prior to the introduction of the contract, polls suggest that problems remain.


