From the Guardian today:

Police were called to manage hundreds of people lined up outside a dentist in Bristol, who had flocked to the newly opened practice desperate to secure an NHS appointment.

The dentist, which was formerly a Bupa dental centre, reopened under the name St Pauls dental practice on Monday morning. The St Pauls area in Bristol has been without a dentist for seven months after the site closed last June.

The Herald and BBC Scotland health correspondents have just returned home after failing to find any dental queues thought they did manage to persuade two friends of Reporting Scotland to pretend to be in one. The camera guy refused saying it looked pathetic.

Why are there no queues here?

This?

The Nuffield Trust said funding for NHS dentistry [in England] had suffered huge cuts in recent years. Some £3.1bn was spent in 2021-22 – a drop of £525m since 2014-15 once inflation is taken into account. It said the number of treatments being done each year was now six million lower than it was before the pandemic.https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-67754983

The full report and the press releases make no mention of Scotland other than this:

Compared to England’s 4.3 dentists per 10,000 population in 2021/22, Northern Ireland had 6, Scotland had 5.9 and Wales had 4.6.https://www.nuffieldtrust.org.uk/research/bold-action-or-slow-decay-the-state-of-nhs-dentistry-and-future-policy-actions

Remarkably, for a research group which has often revealed Scotland’s superior NHS, they do not mention this:

95.4% of the Scottish population were registered with an NHS dentist as at 30 September 2022. Nearly all adults living in the most deprived areas were registered with an NHS dentist in September 2022, compared to 91.9% in the least deprived areas.https://www.publichealthscotland.scot/publications/dental-statistics-registration-and-participation/dental-statistics-nhs-registration-and-participation-24-january-2023/

or this:

From Public Health Scotland on 22 August 2023: The number of examinations paid in the quarter ending June 2023 was 782,783; an increase of 8% compared to the previous quarter (727,751). This was the fourth quarter in a row when examinations increased.https://www.publichealthscotland.scot/publications/nhs-dental-treatments-report-quarterly/nhs-dental-treatment-statistics-quarter-ending-30-june-2023