3. Will the Minister provide an update on the availability of dental services through the NHS in the Ammanford area? OQ59748

Thank you. I am aware that a fairly large contract in Ammanford was handed back to the health board last July. The health board have retendered the contract successfully and the new practice will be opening later this year.

Thank you for that response, Minister. It's to be welcomed, of course, that the new contract will commence at some point over the next few months because of the huge demand in the town after the service came to an end. During the last year, the contract for the Llandeilo Road Dental Surgery in Cross Hands came to an end in August last year. So, the same thing happened in Llandeilo and there is huge demand now in the surrounding area too. So, what assurance can we give to the residents of Ammanford in the first instance, who were former patients of the old service, that they'll be prioritised, and are there plans in place to meet the demand in neighbouring areas and to generate new capacity there too?

Thank you very much. Well, as I said, what's happening is, where people hand contracts back, you have to retender, and what's interesting is that they have been able to get somebody else to take on that contract in Ammanford. They are now redoing the surgery so that it's ready to accept patients—in September, I think, we hope that that will reopen in Ammanford. In the meantime, if there are urgent problems, then people can use the capacity available in terms of the urgent pathway.

What we do know is that there are some areas where the problem is worse than in others. In order to try and get more people to go to those areas, one of the things that we've done is to give that additional £5,000 for people to train in those areas, particularly in rural areas, where we are seeing a problem.

So, what you will now see is the contract going out in Llandeilo and Cross Hands to try and get more people to take the contract on. I understand that the contract in Llandeilo is quite a big one in terms of the numbers being affected, so maybe that will take a little longer.

Can I thank Adam Price for tabling this question? Adam Price spoke about the pressure that is put on dental services in Ammanford, from Carmarthenshire, but obviously, as you know, the Amman valley crosses into Neath Port Talbot as well, in my region. I just wonder, in terms of your answer there to Adam Price in terms of the availability of NHS dental services to other parts of Carmarthenshire, can you also confirm that you will prioritise as well people who, perhaps, live in a different health board or indeed a different county, but would perhaps look to somewhere like Ammanford for their dental needs on the NHS, and that they're also prioritised, not punished for having that border, if you like, put up between them and the most convenient location?

Thanks very much. Well, dentistry is quite different from the way that people deal with GPs. So, quite a lot of people want to go to a dentist near, for example, where they work. So, the patterns of where people go are not necessarily close to where they live. So, that is something that I think is acknowledged within the system. But, one of the things that we've asked health boards to do now is to make sure that they are keeping lists of people who are looking for new dental appointments. Some are further ahead than others. So, Powys, for example, have a centralised system; everybody knows exactly where they are on the list. So, that's a system that is developed. In Hywel Dda, parts of it are developed and parts of it are not. But, by the end of this year, we're hoping to have one national system so that we can get a much better picture of what the demand is, because part of the problem at the moment is that we're not clear what the demand is, despite the fact that, obviously, the new contract has meant that we have been able to provide an extra 178,000 new dental appointments.