The Know Daily - Wednesday 7 February 2024

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A 16-year-old cat has been reunited with her owner more than a decade after she went missing. Whiskas (👇), who was last seen in 2013, was discovered living in a shed in Chilton Moor, near Newcastle, in December last year. She appeared to be a stray, but a vet realised she had an old RSPCA microchip which helped trace her owner - and the pair had an “emotional” reunion.

🦷 The NHS “dental recovery plan”

Dentists are to be offered a £20,000 bonus if they take on new NHS patients and work in under-served areas, under a wider government plan to improve the state of NHS dentistry.

Tell me more.
The bonus - dubbed a “golden hello” - will be offered to up to 240 dentists to “stay and deliver NHS care for at least three years in areas where recruitment and retention of dentists is difficult”, said Sky News.

Under what the government has described as a “dental recovery plan”, NHS dentists will also be paid a “new patient” fee of £15-£50, depending on the treatment required. This should “help care for a million new patients who have not seen a dentist in two years or more”, The Guardian explained.

The plan will also see “dental vans” rolled out in rural and coastal areas in England, as well as “mobile dental teams” sent into schools in under-served areas “to provide advice and deliver fluoride varnish treatments to more than 165,000 kids”, said Sky News.

What’s the bigger picture?
Details of the “dental recovery plan” come days after the opening of a new dental practice in Bristol saw so many people queuing that police were forced to intervene - an incident which shone a spotlight on the state of NHS dentistry.

In 2022, a BBC investigation revealed the full extent of the NHS dentistry shortage, identifying that nine in 10 NHS dental practices across the UK were not accepting new adult patients for treatment under the health service. 

That same year, incidents of “DIY dentistry” were found to be on the rise, including people making improvised dentures and pulling out their own teeth. 

Will this plan make a difference?
Health Secretary Victoria Atkins says the plan - which the Department for Health and Social Care is thought to have mistakenly emailed to all MPs on Tuesday - “will help”.

But critics say it doesn’t go far enough. “This ‘recovery plan’ is not worthy of the title,” said a chair of the British Dental Association. Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting has accused Rishi Sunak’s government of only promising to address the crisis “now there's an election coming”.