Should dental services remain separate from GP practices?
NHS dental services operate separately from GP practices with distinct contracts, funding and premises. Access to NHS dentistry remains challenging with only about 40% of adults seeing a dentist in the recommended timeframe and many practices reducing NHS work. Recent 2026 contract reforms aim to improve urgent care access and prevention but maintain separation while some integrated care boards explore closer collaboration on records and sites.
19 Opinions
The NHS provides dental care. Why are dentists not obligated to provide it?
An unattractive feature of UK especially via media is an unhealthy obsession with earnings pretending in 2026 that as many don’t earn £100K it makes others rich & a Labour target. Most are seriously underpaid & hit by Govt initiated inflation but to suggest otherwise is “greedy” & not “kind”. PM’s pathetic salary is cynically used as benchmark. Dentists highly skilled but NHS does not reward them properly & there is huge excess demand v supply. The ‘elephant’ is immigration
Dental services need to remain separate from GPs - they are very different fields in medicine with very different knowledge and skills required. However, there does need to be a much bigger push to bring them into the NHS in an analogous way to GPs
They should remain separate because as it is its hard enough to get to see a GP. Dentists do need to encouraged to take on more nhs patients too.
We should encourage medial provision in the manner that best meets customer needs. This is achieved by allowing customers and practitioners freedom of choice.
Many dentists own their business give them the choice. Be better if paid more for treatment.
There's no reason why they 'have' to. The question doesn't go into what the pros and cons might be it might be a very good idea
Question conflates site sharing ( good idea), info sharing ( good idea), better NHS coverage (yes), price caps ( yes), full renationalisation of dentistry ( not sure).
Getting to a dentist is hard enough without involving the even worse services of GPS
It was an act of vandalism to cut dentistry off from the fundamental principle of the NHS. We should return to universal dental care.