The health secretary Jeremy Miles has proposed a new hospital-style waiting list for dentists in Wales, but do people think it will work?
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00:00I think anything will work at the moment. Dentistry is perhaps one of the worst aspects of the current public health system, is dentists. You just can't get an NHS dentist for a lot of money.
00:15Nobody really wants to see the dentist, but we all know that that time comes every now and then that we have to.
00:20On top of the already relatively daunting task of sitting in the chair and hearing the buzzing and grinding, actually getting to see a dentist can be the most difficult part.
00:28Under new proposals from the health secretary, Jeremy Miles, though, there is some hope that the stress of finding a dentist could be removed and instead replaced with a central waiting list called the Dental Access Portal.
00:40It's also proposed having checkups every 18 to 24 months in hopes to revolutionise the poor situation dentistry find itself in Wales.
00:48The British Dental Association have said the plans could cause more people to go private, but people around Cardiff have said today that whatever the new plans are, something needs to change.
00:58The thing that's sought to do, well, to lack of a better word, it's a federal problem, it's nationwide, isn't it?
01:04And I know the NHS does quite well because of its federalised database.
01:08We've got a bit of an upper hand on a lot of other countries around Europe, and especially America as well.
01:14So I don't see why we wouldn't do that, to be honest, because all the dentistry is already done through the NHS, so I would have assumed it would already be that way.
01:22I think it's very hard to say what would work, short of, there's a real shortage of dentists, there's the big issue about dentists not getting paid enough for NHS work.
01:35And so I guess with most of the problems, NHS or whatever, there's no simple answer, it's a combination of things that's needed.
01:42Perhaps it might do. I've had a kind of similar situation with my dentist not long ago. I was with NHS for them for a long time, and then it went completely private.
01:50And I think for a lot of people in that practice, it kind of put them in a similar situation where it might be on a waiting list.
01:55It may work, it may not for some people. Luckily, I was able to get with another dentist fairly quick, but it could cause a lot of problems.
02:01It might work either way. It's kind of a double-edged sword thinking about it, it might be, perhaps.
02:04The elephant in the room, though, with creating a new hospital-style waiting list is, of course, the massive backlog of waiting times ongoing within the NHS at the moment.
02:13We've seen records broken in recent months, so can you really trust a new waiting list to fix the old dentist system?
02:20Yes, as long as the waiting list isn't too long, like it is in the NHS, it wiggles.
02:27Yeah, potentially. Potentially it would work. But I still think the waiting times are a problem.
02:35Even if you do have a dentist, you're having to wait 10, 12 weeks to actually be seen, because they're so chopper-blocked with current customers.
02:46Hopefully, yeah, because I know if you look at the NHS as a whole, there is a lot of waiting times across everything, all specialties,
02:53like neurosurgery, everything, orthopedics, there's waiting lists everywhere, but hopefully it might just be one of the ways they can relieve some of the pressure.