The ongoing difficulties faced by medical card holders seeking dental care in Galway is an ‘urgent issue’, according to Sinn Féin TD for Galway West/South Mayo, Mairéad Farrell.
Addressing Minister for Health, Stephen Donnelly, in the Dáil this week, Deputy Farrell detailed the insufficient number of dentists in Galway willing to treat patients under the Dental Treatment Service Scheme (DTSS ).
“When I contact the HSE about what dentists are providing services to medical card holders, I am being told there are 13 dentists, they say, in Galway city and 11 dentists in County Galway, but that is just not the case.
“When can we expect medical card holders to be able to access that dental service? I’ve had a woman who needed a tooth removed and was in massive pain, and she just couldn’t find somebody.
“It’s really an urgent issue.”
Responding to Deputy Farrell, the Minister confirmed that talks with the Irish Dental Association regarding the DTSS are ‘ongoing’.
“There is an ongoing discussion with the Irish Dental Association and reform of this scheme is required, but Ireland’s fee rates, now that we have raised them by 50 percent, do compare favourably.
“I know dentists can make more from private work, and really that’s what’s happening here, but I do believe that dentists should be engaging in that scheme to the greatest extent possible and treating exactly the kind of people you’re talking about.”
Continued calls for reform of DTSS
The Irish Dental Association (IDA ) has been calling for a reform of the DTSS scheme for over a decade. In February 2022, the IDA published a report titled ‘Improving access to dental care for medical card patients’, in which it states that the low numbers of General Dental Practitioners (GDPs ) opting into the DTSS scheme is a consequence of the decision in 2010 to reduce the coverage available for medical card holders.
The report was compiled by Professor Ciaran O’Neill, who said, “This has centred on the incentives funding arrangements provide practitioners and the consequent access afforded to vulnerable groups. Reimbursement levels were reduced following the financial crisis of 2008 and coverage reduced. This has not changed in the 13 years since. Fee levels have failed to keep pace with the rising cost of care and has seen GDPs withdraw from the main adult scheme – the Dental Treatment Service Scheme (DTSS ) – in record numbers.”
The reports foreword authored by the IDA president, Dr Caroline Robins, states that in early 2022 there were just 750 dentists across Ireland accepting the DTSS scheme, a figure which works out to one dentist per 2,000 medical card patients. Just seven months after the report was published, the IDA released a statement titled, “Public dental schemes on verge of collapse.”
IDA members returned a vote of ‘no confidence’ in Minister for Health, Stephen Donnelly, at its pre-conference Annual General Meeting in May 2023, and a subsequent survey into the wait times facing patients. It found that 80 percent of IDA members who currently hold a DTSS contract say they are ‘no longer able to take on or see new medical card patients’, and 93 per cent of dentists say that they ‘would not sign up to the medical card contract in its current form during any talks on a new scheme’.
