Dental Services (Highlands and Islands)

Question Time — Scottish Executive — Health and Community Care – in the Scottish Parliament at 2:15 pm on 7 December 2006.

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. Dave Petrie (Highlands and Islands) (Con): To ask the Scottish Executive what the average and maximum waiting times are for patients seeking appointments with dentists and orthodontists in the Highlands and Islands. (S2O-11349)

Photo of Lewis Macdonald Lewis Macdonald Labour

The national maximum waiting time for a first time out-patient appointment with a consultant following referral, including the specialty of orthodontics, is 26 weeks. All NHS boards are meeting that commitment. We intend to reduce the national maximum waiting time to 18 weeks from the end of 2007. I understand that in the year to 30 September, the median waiting time for a first out-patient appointment in orthodontics in the Highlands and Islands was 152 days.

Photo of Dave Petrie Dave Petrie Conservative

The figures that the minister has given concern me and, I hope, many others.

Is the minister aware that, in October this year, the waiting lists for dental care in the Highlands and Islands reached more than 29,000 people and that although dentists in the region are eager to take on new patients it is nigh impossible to do so because of those tremendously long lists?

Photo of Lewis Macdonald Lewis Macdonald Labour

I do not accept that analysis. We would encourage dentists in the Highlands and Islands who wish to take on national health service patients to do so. We have provided significant financial incentives for them to do that. I was delighted to visit the Highlands just a few days ago to open a new NHS dental facility in Caithness, from where six dentists will serve the whole of that area, and to visit the extension to an existing NHS dental surgery at Culloden, which will serve the area east of Inverness. Between them, those two NHS initiatives will serve, and will be able to register, some thousands of patients in the Highlands over the next 18 months. That is a positive trend.

I encourage dentists in the Highlands who have deregistered their fee-paying adult patients to revisit that decision in view of the greatly increased financial incentives for them to treat all categories of patient on the NHS. If they do that, they will help to reduce the waiting lists even more quickly.