Sinn Féin TD Rose Conway-Walsh has called on the Department of Health and the HSE to take emergency action to address 'the alarming lack of dentists offering services to Medical Card patients through the Dental Treatment Services Scheme/DTSS. Speaking in the Dáil recently, Deputy Conway-Walsh said: "Of all the dental practices throughout the county of Mayo, only one is currently treating Medical Card patients and taking on new patients, but even then, only for specific treatments.
"In a county the size of Mayo, with a population of approximately 130,000, this is beyond shocking and cannot be allowed to go on. The HSE website information is completely out of date. This became evident when it didn’t match up with the huge amounts of people contacting my office desperate for dental care. Despite putting a number of questions to both the Minister and the HSE, we were repeatedly referred back to the information online. We now know that this information is out of date. My office contacted each of the 30 dentists listed by the HSE. Ten said they are treating current Medical Card patients, but not taking any new patients.
"Ten of them told us they do not or are no longer providing any Medical Card dental treatment service. Two had retired, five of the phone numbers were out of service, and the others didn’t respond to our call. When I highlighted this issue a year ago, the number of dentists offering these services had dropped from 50 in 2019, to 38 in 2021. We now know that even this alarming decline in official numbers masks the reality on the ground. There has been a severe decrease of government funding in the DTSS, as between 2017 and 2020, state spending on dental care for medical card patients decreased by 30%, from €5.5 million to €3.8 million.
"This led to unprecedented numbers of dentists leaving the scheme. The impact of this lack of services disproportionately falls on lower income groups, especially those who rely on medical cards. And according to the Irish Dental Association, delays in dental treatment or difficulty in access contributes to poor oral health and greater healthcare costs. And we know that care delayed is care denied. It’s simply not good enough that in Mayo, dental services are only accessible to those with money.
"The Minister for Health and the HSE must step in immediately to fix these urgent issues with the DTSS scheme and the information on the HSE website. We also need significant additional investment in public health dental capacity with more dentists and orthodontists employed in the public system."
