The Association of Dental Groups (ADG), the UK’s leading trade body for the dental workforce including dentists and other dental care professionals across NHS, Private and Community-based services, welcomes the DHSC’s call for evidence for the NHS 10 Year Workforce Plan (10YHP). Broad consultation to the new workforce plan is a step the ADG has been asking for repeatedly, and the Association looks forward to contributing its expertise.
The ADG understands that the intention is to build on the earlier 10YHP published in July 2025, which will guide the government to put in place a sustainable workforce model supporting the NHS’s shift from hospital to community, from analogue to digital, and from sickness to prevention.
Neil Carmichael, Executive Chair, Association of Dental Groups said: “The ADG will focus over the next six weeks on showing how the most effective and efficient model must consider the whole dental workforce. Across the four nations we have massive gaps in dental teams currently and we have to get this new plan right to fill this void and improve patient access.
“This means that the refreshed workforce model should maximise the impact we can achieve by incorporating all dental care professionals front-and-centre into the plan. Policymakers need to remember that for every appointment with a dentist, there must be a dental nurse present, and that today dental therapists are trained to be able to undertake approximately 70-80% of the work that dentists do.
“We also have thousands of highly-trained international dentists already in the UK ready to roll their sleeves up. This is an immediate and ‘low hanging fruit’ solution to support patients desperate to get a dental appointment, the access they deserve. The new workforce plan must include a provision for unblocking the Overseas Registration Examination bottleneck which currently is preventing these trained dental professionals getting to work.”
