Anger as people are being forced to perform DIY tooth extractions using a PLIERS because they can’t get an NHS dental appointment – as shocking study finds only 1% of practices now offer taxpayer-funded checks

Britons are pulling out their own teeth with pliers due to the worsening dental crisis in the NHS.

Jamie Totterdell said he has had to perform several DIY extractions because he has been unable to get an appointment for the past 16 years.

He couldn’t afford private treatment, although he could afford the checkups.

The only time Mr Totterdell managed to see an NHS dentist was through an emergency appointment after one of his DIY extractions went wrong.

He told ITV’s Good Morning Britain: ‘After one extraction I had to go to the dentist because I had left (pieces of) teeth in there.’

Mr Totterdell, whose age or location was not revealed by the show, added: ‘They had to have surgery to correct that.’

His sensational story was told in a section highlighting that only 1 per cent of practices now offer an on-demand NHS appointment.

Eddie Crouch, chairman of the British Dental Association (BDA), said he was being contacted every week by people forced to carry out their own dentistry during the appointment crisis.

He warned that people may be risking their lives because of the complications that can arise from a botched DIY extraction.

Mr Crouch said: ‘People hope they can get it right, but of course when they put tongs in their mouth they can’t see what they’re doing and they end up breaking a tooth, leaving a root in it. become very infected.

‘Unfortunately we have seen people with serious infections who almost ended up in sepsis. It’s shocking what can happen.’

Mr Crouch also revealed that DIY dentistry didn’t stop at extractions, with some Britons resorting to using super glue to fix broken teeth.

Some of the practices GMB contacted had a five-year waiting list for NHS patients.

The findings come despite ministers promising to fix the worsening NHS dental appointments crisis.

Desperate patients have had to endure huge four-am queues in a quest to be seen with others even flying to war-torn Ukraine for cheaper private dentistry.

GMB approached 100 dentists across 10 regions in England to inquire about the availability of NHS and private appointments.

This study was a repeat of a similar study conducted by GMB in 2016.

At the time, all ten regions had dentists who could offer an NHS appointment.

But according to the latest research, only three regions had this capacity.

Overall, just 1 percent of dentists surveyed could offer an NHS appointment, a huge drop from 13 percent in 2016.

But access to private appointments has increased dramatically over the same period.

The latest research shows that 17 percent of dental practices can offer private appointments, compared to 12 percent eight years ago.

Private appointments for a simple dental check routinely cost around £75, almost three times 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 private dental services have exploded in the major cities of London.

In 2016, just 40 percent of dentists in the capital offered private appointments, but this has risen to 70 percent in the latest survey.

One practice told GMB that a same-day appointment for a patient would cost £260.

It was a similar story in other regions of England.

In Leeds, none of the practices contacted were able to offer NHS appointments, but half were able to offer a same-day private appointment.

Only one in ten dental practices in Newcastle were able to offer an NHS appointment, while in Norwich this fell to zero.

One dentist in Southampton told researchers there was a waiting list of 2,000 people for NHS appointments, and another in Leeds said they had a five-year waiting list.

The findings come despite the government’s recently announced £200 million dental recovery plan.

This offers dentists financial incentives of up to £50 per new NHS patient they see, as well as offering £20,000 golden hellos to attract them to work in England’s so-called ‘dental deserts’ where taxpayer-subsidized dental appointments are lacking .

The minister hoped that the stimulus measures would generate another 2.5 million appointments in the coming year.

But the plan – ten months after it was originally promised – was unveiled by dental bosses and politicians as it did not go far enough.

The BDA has said this amounted to ‘rearranging the deckchairs’ and would not deliver the desired and much-needed change.

Official figures show that 24,151 dentists took up NHS work in England in 2022-23, compared to 24,272 in the previous financial year – a fall of 121.

The latest total is around 500 fewer than the number of dentists carrying out NHS work in 2019-2020, the last year before the Covid pandemic hit.

The BDA fears numbers could fall further to below 24,000, a figure not recorded since 2014-15.

Visitor numbers to NHS dentists for both adults and children fell off a cliff during the Covid pandemic as practices closed as part of the lockdown rules and stopped offering treatments.

But it has failed to recover despite the pandemic’s darkest days being far in the past.

Industry experts suggest this is because offering NHS treatment is not as lucrative as private treatment.

Old NHS contracts for dentists paid them for batches of work carried out rather than for individual treatments, no matter how complicated a particular case was.

In practice, this meant that NHS dentists were paid the same for treating a patient who needed ten fillings as for a patient who only needed one.

This resulted in dentists losing money treating some NHS patients as what they received did not cover the cost of the procedure.

Although this contact has now been reformed, the BDA estimates that thousands of NHS dentists have left or massively scaled back their NHS work following the pandemic.

What is exacerbating the crisis is that as more and more dentists leave or significantly reduce their NHS work, those who are still at risk are becoming overwhelmed.

A 2022 BDA post-pandemic survey of dentists found that three-quarters were experiencing burnout, leaving them feeling unable to devote enough time to their patients to give them the care they needed.

And as with the GP appointment crisis, frustrations can boil over as patients struggle to gain access.

The same BDA survey found that 86 percent of dentists said their practice had been physically or verbally abused by patients.

A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Social Care told GMB that the government’s dental recovery plan meant ‘more practices across England are already accepting new adult patients.’

The latest figures from June last year show that around 26 million adults (about 60 percent of the population) have not had a check-up in the past two years.

This is one of the lowest rates since modern records began in 2006.