Cornwall’s director of public health said there had been a ‘market failure of quite staggering proportions’ in NHS dentistry. Rachel Wigglesworth made the comments in response to a report which laid bare the difficulties people face in seeing an NHS dentist.

In a report which was submitted to Cornwall Council’s Adult Health and Social Care Monitoring and Control Committee yesterday, it was stated that just over a third of adults and 40% of children in Cornwall had been seen by an NHS dentist within the last year.

It was also revealed that while the NHS ordered over 900,000 treatments in 2020/21, only 24% were delivered. This was partly due to the Covid-19 pandemic and by 2021/22 it had risen to 59%.

Read more: Number of people able to access NHS dentist in Cornwall drops

Speaking at the committee meeting, Rachel said detailed figures showed a third of 12-year-olds in Cornwall had no dentist and stressed that reduced access to NHS dentists would increase the pressure on emergency dental care. She said: “In terms of dental treatment and access, this is a market failure of quite staggering proportions for Cornwall.”

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NHS Kernow’s Tessa Fielding, who is responsible for commissioning NHS dental services in Cornwall, said one of the current problems was that the contracting process was not fit for purpose.

She said that while NHS England planned to reform dental contractual arrangements, she did not expect this to improve the situation.

Rachel Wigglesworth said if a new model contract was introduced it would be useful if there was consultation on new proposals so local organizations could have a say and help shape it so that it helped.

She said if there was a market failure in primary care services there was a need for a GP to be in place to meet the need, as she understood this was a model different for dental services which would be a way to guarantee people don’t lose out.

NHS Kernow said it could only afford to pay for dental services that would cover half of Cornwall’s population, which the director of public health called “shocking”.

Councilors in Cornwall told the committee of cases in their areas where people were struggling to find a dentist or access NHS dental care. Armand Toms de Looe said there was now just one dentist in the town to provide dental care for 5,300 people and said it was “more than one person can handle”.

The committee heard there were problems recruiting and retaining dentists in Cornwall to provide NHS services and said more work was being done to try to encourage newly qualified dentists to move to the area .