Mr. Fintan Hourihan:

Oral health is probably the one part of the health service where there is a visible difference, literally, between a person who can afford to see a dentist regularly and a person who cannot afford to do so. That is the remarkable thing about dentistry. Dentistry is probably singular in the sense that prevention can resolve many problems. That is why the school screening service is so important. It means, first, a dentist sees a child at a young age and prevents problems and, second, all children, regardless of their means or background, are seen on an equal basis.

What needs to be done is to employ more dentists in the public service. Dentists in the public service are specially trained and focus on seeing children. Obviously, all dentists can see children but those who specialise will probably have a greater impact. There are difficulties in hiring dentists. First, permission has to be given to hire the dentists. For many years, dentists who were retiring or going on leave were not being replaced as a matter of policy. That has been relaxed but, unfortunately, when the HSE seeks to hire dentists, it simply cannot attract them to work there. That reflects several things. Apparently, the stress of working in the service, where one constantly deals with children requiring emergency treatment, exacerbates the problem. There are fewer dentists and they are seeing children in emergency pain-relief scenarios rather than visiting schools, preventing problems and heading off all those difficult engagements. In short, more dentists need to be hired. How can that be done?

That can be done by making the HSE a more attractive place to work. We have said to the HSE on countless occasions that it is not just about salary. It is also about the working environment and professional development. If, instead of preventing problems, dentists have to deal with pain relief and emergency treatment for children, it is a very different job to what most people signed up for. While most people will focus on children and rightly so, special care patients are also big losers here because the HSE is not allowed or cannot take on consultants in special care dentistry because the law does not recognise the specialty of special care dentistry. We have eminently qualified dentists working in the UK who want to come back here. The HSE cannot offer them consultant positions because there is no such thing as a specialist division of the register. At the stroke of a pen, the Minister for Health could recognise additional specialties. That would have a huge benefit for paediatric and special care dentists and all sorts of specialties which are recognised in the UK but not recognised here. That makes it particularly difficult for the HSE to bring in specialists, because by law, there is there is no specialty in paediatric or special care dentistry