What are surveys for?

  Posted by: Dental Design      23rd November 2018

There seems to be a surfeit of “surveys” around at the moment, the least important of which seem to always grab the headlines.

I recently saw a survey published in a dental magazine about a looming mass exodus from the NHS in the next five years. This survey reminded me of the survey published by the BDA in the run up to the introduction of local commissioning in 2006. I remember having to do multiple media interviews after this particular BDA survey suggested that 96 per cent of dentists would leave the NHS if the new arrangements were introduced, plainly rubbish but it got the headlines which is what it was intended to do. The actual loss of service around the introduction was around 3 per cent, mainly practices with a very small NHS commitment and where the dentists were inexplicably walking away from life time indexation of their pensions.

The results of this recent survey were remarkably similar and although if you looked closely in the margins of the magazine you could see the words “advertorial” ,this obviously did not have the same prominence as the attention seeking headline.

If you looked closer at the origins of the survey then it became clearer that the survey was carried out by the provider of a private patient payment plan which has a direct financial interest in people moving away from the NHS.

The relationship between NHS and private provision in dentistry is clearly changing, indeed it has been for many years, the NHS is there, funded by taxpayers (through taxation or patient charges) to provide treatment or advice that is deemed clinically necessary and which the patient is wiling to undergo. The private sector is there to provide care that the patient wants, whether clinically necessary or not, without the constraint of NHS rules and regulations.

What is clear from every source of information is that the quality of care provided by dentists and their teams is high, whatever the method of funding. I think it is a pity that organisations trying to promote a non NHS model do so, so often, by criticising the standard of care in the NHS.

I practiced clinically for many years and found that the most rewarding thing was the ability to make a deference to peoples’ lives, whether it be providing eight veneers to improve the appearance of a young lady with pitting hypoplasia in her incisors or managing to motivate and support somebody from a homeless shelter who had never really had somebody take an interest in them before. This is what professionalism is all about, doing what is best for every patient and putting your personal interests second. We are lucky, as dentists, that, at the end of the year, the financial reward is at a level that most in society can only dream about no matter how hard they work.

The reality is that the impact of these surveys has always, ultimately, been small. In a profession where the significant majority of graduates are now female who would walk away from a system where you can keep the benefits of self employed status and still have generous maternity pay arrangements and a pension to which the NHS also makes a contribution.

We live in a world where it is no longer a case of “NHS or private”, the dental world is a mixed economy within which dentists can reap the benefits of both systems and offer genuine choice to patients.

Financially, the recent significant increases in patient charges in the NHS have made it a reality that a significant number of people may find it more economical to have relatively minor work carried out in the private sector, but this needs careful messaging to the patient.

The real pity is that is that when genuine survey data are available which demonstrate that the negativity which seems to surround dentistry in the media is misplaced it generates little media interest. Public Health England has published data, which shows that dentists are playing a vital role in supporting the improvement in oral health that has been a feature of our society for years.

The challenge now is to ensure that those who have not benefited so much from the overall improvement, such as the homeless and those from the more deprived groups are not excluded.