Paying for NHS root canal treatment

brook2jack

1998 ....... you could still refer kids to clinics that weren't in your area so they could have painful, abscessed teeth out with ga in no more than six days rather than six months.

You could refer patients with difficult problems to a dental hospital and know they would be treated and not have the referral bounced back or being told your lhb/pct will no longer fund treatment at that hospital.

You could provide domicillary visits for elderly,disabled patients on the nhs and make sure that 90 year old who had her dentures lost by the hospital could have a new set in weeks , instead of having to wait months to be put on a waiting list to be seen by overstretched community dentists.

If you had done clinical attachments the local orthodontic specialist could refer cases to you to do the treatment under their supervision, so there was no eighteen month waiting list just to be seen for assessment, let alone treatment.

In 1998 there was not a single private practice in the whole of our county. In 2006 all but eight converted to mostly private.

There's a story there about nhs dentistry that's clear to see.

dave1992_2

I'd be interested to know how the OP case turned out. Did you contact the PCT, what did they say, etc?

I'm in the same situation myself now - my dentist said my lower back molar is tricky and has curved roots and he couldn't do it manually, but if I paid he could use the machine to do it.

(as a slight aside, since we have so many dentists on this thread, this tooth had a crown on 8 months ago, and has been fine. But I now have extreme pain centred on this tooth - it's a week before I could get the appointment - does that extreme pain mean it's likely that this would be a re-occuring thing if the antibiotics happen to clear it up completely - I'm not sure how you decide something is RCT or just go with antibiotics - or do the antibiotics rarely clear it up completely? Sorry, maybe this isn't the place for all that)

thanks
Dave

mda99das

What about where a dentist works in a practice which is NHS and not well equipped enough to tackle the case. However the dentist works at a PVT clinic in the same time with no NHS contract.
What is there to stop the SAME dentist doing it on a PVT basis with the consent?

NHS rules and regs don't apply
as
1) no NHS contract to carry out the work at the second site
2) no UDA allocation
3) CQC issues

comments please