Dentists are doctors, too – so why have we been forgotten during Britain’s fight against Covid?

Now is the time to change course, and for dentists to go from being all but absent from conversations about tackling the pandemic, to being a key part of it

Dentists were told to shut during the first lockdown because they weren’t deemed an essential service (Getty Images)

As Britain celebrates the beginning of the vaccine delivery, we should be asking who has the skills, as well as the workforce, to roll it out as safely and as quickly as possible. Part of the answer is the UK’s 40,000 dentists.  

There has been talk of firefighters or even unqualified volunteers administering the jab – hardly what vaccine sceptics need to reassure them. Now dentists, who are medical professionals and are permitted to use the title “doctor”, are finally being invited to sign up to help vaccinate the nation. It’s a welcome announcement, but up until now we have been largely forgotten and ignored throughout the pandemic.  

In the UK we do not seem to treat oral health as the essential medical field that it is; too many of us see it as a dreaded bi-annual confession, or worse, an optional luxury on a par with cosmetic procedures.

But in Britain, as across the world, poor dental care means you will die younger. It could also mean you will have an undiagnosed cancer, and suffer more severely from Covid-19.

In many parts of the world, the health importance of dentistry is implicitly recognised – dentists are just another type of doctor. But many in the profession in the UK feel they’re “only a dentist” in the eyes of many.  

As a result, it is unsurprising that the UK sector faces a recruitment crisis. Why would you take on as much debt and train for as long, if not longer, than a GP or surgeon, to go into a field that isn’t valued in the same way by the society in which you live?  

If something doesn’t change soon, we will all suffer. Waiting lists for dentists during the pandemic have spiked. In 2020, around 7,700 patients are waiting for longer than 18 weeks between referral and treatment, a figure up from 4,100 in 2019. A lot of this has to do with chronic underfunding of dentists by the NHS.

Today, many dental health professionals feel the NHS is too large to focus on delivering dental care, and an independent entity like a National Dental Service, or NDS, might be needed to enable dentists to deliver the patient care they want to.

That care includes being part of the frontline during the pandemic – whether in vaccine delivery, or in preventing the spread of the virus. Despite the evidence above, oral health has hardly been prioritised in the government’s communications about a virus that is largely transmitted through the mouth.  

If instead of “Wash your hands and wear a mask”, the message was “Wash your hands, brush your teeth and wear a mask”, many virus transmissions may have been avoided.  

Now is the time to change course, and for dentists to go from being all but absent from the conversation, to being a key part of it.  

Having dentists and their qualified medical staff deliver vaccines in their sanitised practices as the rollout scales up could take a significant burden off the rest of the NHS. An NHS that dentists are, after all, an essential part of.

Although it is very noble for firefighters, unqualified volunteers, or anyone else to offer their services in the vaccine rollout, we must remember that we have trained, trusted medical professionals embedded in every community, and they want to help.

Shaz Memon is founder of Digimax Dental and Nilesh Parmar is co-founder of Parmar Dental.