Brits are pulling out their teeth with pliers as the NHS dental crisis gets worse and worse.
Jamie Totterdell said he has been forced to perform several DIY extractions because he has been unable to get an appointment over the past 16 years.
He could not afford private treatment, although he could pay for check-ups.
The only time Totterdell managed to see an NHS dentist was via an emergency appointment after one of his do-it-yourself extractions went wrong.
He told ITV’s Good Morning Britain: “After an extraction I had to go to the dentist because I was gone.” [pieces of] teeth there.’
Totterdell, whose age or location was not revealed on the show, added: “They had to do surgery to rectify that.”
Her eye-opening story was told in a section highlighting how only 1 per cent of practices now offer an NHS appointment on request.
Eddie Crouch, president of the British Dental Association (BDA), said he was contacted every week by people forced to do home dentistry amid the appointments crisis.
He warned that people were potentially risking their lives due to the complications that can occur from a botched DIY extraction.
Mr Crouch said: “People expect to be able to do it correctly, but obviously by putting a pair of pliers in their mouth they can’t see what they are doing and end up breaking a tooth, leaving a root that could become seriously infected.
‘We have seen people, unfortunately, with serious infections and who are almost suffering from sepsis. “It’s shocking what could happen.”
Crouch also revealed that DIY dentistry was not limited to extractions, with some Britons resorting to using super glue to repair broken teeth.
Some of the clinics GMB contacted had a five-year waiting list for NHS patients.
The findings come despite ministers promising to fix the NHS’s worsening dental appointments crisis.
Desperate patients have endured gigantic queues until 4am in search of treatment, while others have even flown to war-torn Ukraine in search of cheaper private dentistry.
GMB approached 100 dentists in 10 regions of England to ask about the availability of NHS and private appointments.
This survey was a repeat of similar research that GMB conducted in 2016.
Then all 10 regions had dentists who could offer an NHS appointment.
But in the last survey only three regions had this capacity.
Overall, only 1 per cent of dentists surveyed were able to offer an NHS appointment, a massive decrease from the 2016 figure of 13 per cent.
But access to private dating has skyrocketed over the same period.
The most recent survey found that 17 percent of dental offices could offer a private appointment, up from 12 percent eight years earlier.
Private appointments for a basic dental check typically cost around £75, almost triple the standard NHS rate of £26.80.
But GMB reportedly found some practices were charging more than £250 for urgent same-day private appointments.
The research found that the provision of private dental services has soared in major London cities.
In 2016, only 40 per cent of the capital’s dentists offered private appointments, but in the most recent survey this figure rose to 70 per cent.
One practice told GMB that a same-day appointment for a patient would cost £260.
The story was similar in other regions of England.
In Leeds, none of the practices contacted could offer NHS appointments, but half could offer a same-day private appointment.
Only one in 10 dental practices in Newcastle could offer an NHS appointment, while in Norwich this figure drops to zero.
One dentist in Southampton told investigators he had a waiting list of 2,000 people for NHS appointments, and another in Leeds said he had a five-year waiting list.
The findings come despite the government’s recently announced £200 million dental recovery plan.
This offers dentists cash incentives of up to £50 for every new NHS patient they see, as well as providing them with £20,000 golden greetings to entice them to work in England’s so-called ‘dental deserts’, where taxpayer-subsidized dental appointments are lacking. .
The minister hoped the incentives would generate an additional 2.5 million appointments over the next year.
But the plan, unveiled 10 months after its original promise, was criticized by dental bosses and politicians for not going far enough.
The BDA has said this would amount to “rearranging sun loungers” and would not bring the desired and much-needed change.
Official figures show 24,151 dentists worked in the NHS in England in 2022-23, down from 24,272 in the previous financial year, a fall of 121.
The latest total is around 500 fewer than the number of dentists who did NHS work in 2019-20, the last year before the Covid pandemic broke out.
The BDA fears that the numbers could fall further, to below 24,000, a figure that has not been recorded since 2014-15.
NHS dentist attendance figures for both adults and children fell off a cliff during the Covid pandemic when practices closed as part of lockdown rules and stopped offering treatments.
But it has not managed to recover even though the darkest days of the pandemic are now in the past.
Industry experts suggest this is because offering NHS treatment is not as lucrative as going private.
The old NHS contracts for dentists paid them for batches of work carried out rather than for individual treatments, regardless of how complicated a particular case might be.
In practice, this meant that NHS dentists were paid the same for treating a patient who needed 10 fillings as a patient who needed just one.
This resulted in dentists losing money when treating some NHS patients, as what they were paid did not cover the costs of the procedure.
While this contact has now been reformed, the BDA estimates that thousands of NHS dentists left or greatly reduced their work in the NHS after the pandemic.
Compounding the crisis, as more dentists leave or greatly reduce their work in the NHS, those who remain at risk are feeling overwhelmed.
A BDA survey of dentists after the pandemic in 2022 suggested that three-quarters were experiencing burnout and felt unable to spend enough time with their patients to provide them with the care they needed.
And, as with the GP appointment crisis, as patients struggle to gain access, frustrations can boil over.
The same BDA survey found that 86 per cent of dentists said their practice had received physical or verbal abuse from patients.
A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson told GMB that the Government’s dental recovery plan meant “more practices are now accepting new adult patients across England”.
The latest figures, from June last year, show that around 26 million adults – around 60 per cent of the population – have not had a check-up in the past two years.
This is one of the lowest ratios since modern records began in 2006.