Dental practice in West Sussex town offers free NHS appointments for children: East Grinstead dentist helps tackle crisis

The High Street Dental Practice said these would be for under-18s only because they have few sessions available, but they are trying to make more room during the forthcoming half term. Visit www.highstreetdentalpractice.com.

Jaspal Sandhu, owner and principal dentist, said he wanted to help after seeing the pain and suffering toothache can cause while working in North Africa with other dentists and nurses from around the UK.

He said: “In 2010 I, along with five other people, co-founded a charity whose sole purpose at the time was to help treat children of the Berber tribe in northern Morocco.”

He said he had heard there was only one person responsible for the dentistry of 50,000 people. “We managed in any given week to treat 1,000 children,” he said. “It was actually really harrowing because you saw children with so much dental pain.”

Jaspal said he felt grateful that the UK did not have this problem. But he said he was shocked recently to learn that the cost of NHS dental extractions in hospitals for the financial year 2021 to 2022 was £81m. According to the government, there were 42,180 episodes of tooth extractions in NHS hospitals for 0 to 19-year-olds.

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Jaspal said: “If teeth are going to be extracted that means they’re beyond saving, and if they’ve got be extracted that means a lot of children in this country are suffering the same sort of pain as the kids in Africa.”

He said: “I didn’t have my eyes closed – I knew there was an issue with the NHS, we all did – but I didn’t think it was that bad.”

So Jaspal and his colleagues decided they had to help and will focus on those most in need. They will offer free treatments including: full check ups, radiographs, fissure fillings, cleaning, and, in the worst cases, extractions, all on the NHS.

Jaspal belives the current crisis in NHS dentistry ‘ultimately comes down to funding’. He said he understands that NHS funds need to be given to more serious and life-threatening issues, but said that sadly dentistry is ‘quite low down on people's list of priorities’.

He said: “The amount of money that’s been apportioned to NHS dentisry has just become less and less. As a consequence dentists in the UK are finding it harder and harder to make a profit while seeing people on the NHS. With most of them, it comes down to the contract. Most dentists will fulfill their contract, which means they will see so many patients in a given year, and after that they will not get paid anything so effectively they’d be making a loss.”

But Jaspal, who qualified from Kings Dental school in 1986, said The High Street Dental Practice wants to give back to the East Grinstead community. He said: “They’re very supportive of us and our practice has been been around for 50-plus years now.”