Some 28.1 million people have seen an NHS dentist in the last two years, according to figures published today by The Information Centre for health and social care.

Of those, 20.3 million were adults and 7.8 million were children.

The IC has released the fourth quarterly data on NHS dental activity and workforce since the launch of the new commissioning and contractual arrangements for NHS dentistry on 1 April 2006.

The figures show the number of patients seeing an NHS dentist remained little changed from the previous year.

At 31 March 2007, 55.7 per cent of the population had seen an NHS dentist in the last two years - 51.5 per cent of adults and 70.7 per cent of children.

The proportion of adults who had seen an NHS dentist in the previous two years varied from 40.8 per cent in South Central Strategic Health Authority (SHA) area to 60.3 per cent in the North East SHA area. For children, the proportion varied from 65.3 per cent in London SHA to 73.7 per cent in South West SHA.

NHS dentists carried out 10.1 million courses of treatments in the fourth quarter. This represented an increase of 800,000 or 8.6 per cent since the third quarter, but was mainly due to later monthly processing cycles for the fourth quarter, which allows more activity to be included in the statistics.

The number of dentists on open NHS contracts at 31 March 2007 was provisionally 21,038. This represented a dentist on an open NHS contract for every 2,397 of the population.

NHS Dental Statistics for England, Quarter 4: 31 March 2007 only includes information received and processed up until the end of March. Dentists have until the end of May to report activity for the full year.

The latest quarterly report is at pubs/dentalq4

A summary of the new dental contract covering all activity completed during 2006/07 will be published in August 2007.

ENDS

Notes to editors

1. The Information Centre (The IC) is England's authoritative, independent source of health and social care information. It works with more than 300 health and social care providers nationwide to provide the facts and figures that help the NHS and social services run effectively. Its role is to collect data, analyse it and convert it into useful information which helps providers improve their services and supports academics, researcher, regulators and policymakers in their work. The IC also produces more than 120 statistical publications each year across a number of areas including: primary care, health and lifestyles, screening, hospital care, population and geography, social care and workforce and pay statistics.
2. For media enquires please call 0845 257 6990 or contact:

Cathy Beveridge on 0113 254 7120, cathy.beveridge@ic.nhs.uk

Sarah Dahlgren on 0113 254 7272, sarah.dahlgren@ic.nhs.uk

Fraser Woodward on 07983 629448, fraser.woodward@ic.nhs.uk