The move comes amid an ongoing crisis in dental access
There is an ongoing crisis in dental care in Bristol – these were the scenes earlier this year when hundreds queued outside St Pauls Dentists after the practice announced they would be accepting 100 more NHS patients(Image: Paul Gillis/Bristol Post)
A Bristol dentist is opening its doors to potentially thousands of new NHS patients. Lodge Causeway Dental Centre, in Fishponds, will open for in-person and telephone registrations for new patients on Saturday September 6.
“We’re pleased to offer an opportunity for new NHS patients from our local community to register with us, in response to the ongoing high demand for NHS dental care in the area,” a practice owner said.
“To ensure we can manage enquiries efficiently and continue to provide uninterrupted service to our existing patients, we’ve chosen to open our appointment books for new registrations on one dedicated Saturday.”
In July, Lodge Causeway opened up thousands of new appointments for NHS patients, but only for those experiencing pain or urgent dental problems.
Now, thanks to taking on board three new dentists, the practice is able to expand that to register new patients for ongoing care.
The exact number of spaces newly available at the practice is unknown, but a spokesperson for the practice said they estimated they could take on as many as 3000 new patients.
Due to the expected high demand, the practice will be employing four receptionists on September 6, when it will be accepting new patient registrations between 8am and 4pm.
Patients must have an NHS number in order to register.
Lodge Causeway’s move comes amid an ongoing crisis in dental access in Bristol, and in many parts of the country.
There are many so-called ‘dental deserts’ in some parts of the country, where locals are forced to go to A&E for urgent care or made to go private because of a lack of availability of NHS dentists in their area.
This has a knock-on effect for other areas, as people go further and further from their homes to register for a dentist.
An example of this occurred in Bristol in February this year, when long queues formed outside St Pauls Dental Practice on Ashley Road when the practice announced it had space for a hundred new patients.
Some of the people who queued came from as far away as Cornwall and Torquay. Practice manager Gauri Pradhan referred to the situation as “desperate”.
St Pauls made national headlines when it reopened in February 2024 as thousands of people, many of them elderly or disabled, lined up on the street outside to register for local care. Some people queued for multiple days just to get on the NHS list.
In the run up to last year’s general election, now-Labour MP Claire Hazelgrove carried out a survey in her electorate of Filton and Bradley Stoke. Just 31 per cent of respondents said they had an NHS dentist, while 97 per cent of those that didn’t have access said they would like to.
The government recently proposed a series of measures aiming to provide a long term fix to what the British Dental Association has described as a “broken system”.
Some of the changes being considered include newly qualified dentists having to work in the NHS for three years in order to boost the number of appointments available outside the private sector. Plans also include a requirement for dentists to deliver a set amount of urgent and unscheduled care each year.