In anopen letter to Health Secretary Wes Streeting, dentists have warned that a failure to fully meet demand for urgent dental care can only increase the pressures on our health service, as antibiotics become a substitute for treatment.
The chances of a dental appointment resulting in an antibiotic prescription increased dramatically during the pandemic, and newresearchled by Dr Wendy Thompson from The University of Manchester shows prescribing levels across each of the UK’s four nations have been slow to return to where they would have been if the pandemic hadn’t happened.
Though the Government has begun commissioning 700,000 urgent appointments, the British Dental Association says the total unmet need is far higher.
Dr Thompson also leads on antimicrobial stewardship for the College of General Dentistry and chairs the FDI World Dental Federation's Preventing Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) and Infections task team.
She said: “Too many people have been unable to access urgent dental treatment for toothache, and have ended up with antibiotics. The best way to protect us all from the existential threat of antibiotic resistance is to ensure patients have timely access to urgent care.
“Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, we knew that dentistry was responsible for around 10% of antibiotic prescriptions and that rates of unnecessary use were high. During the early part of the COVID-19 pandemic, the amount of antibiotic prescribing by NHS dentistsincreased dramatically.