University of Suffolk hopes new facilities could help tackle county's dental crisis
The university is opening a state-of-the-art new training facility
Bosses at the University of Suffolk are hoping their new dentistry facilities could help tackle the county's dentistry crisis.
Suffolk's regularly been described as a 'dental desert' , and back in February, it was revealed Suffolk's among worst in the country for availability of NHS dentist appointments.
Now, the University of Suffolk's hoping its new, state-of-the-art facilities will be able to help more people in the county see a dentist.
When the facilities are up and running in Spring, they'll give students practical experience and placements.
New dental treatment facilities will treat patients referred by NHS 111, with a particular focus on the patients in Suffolk and Northeast Essex in greatest need.
Eventually they'll provide an additional 18,000 hours of NHS dental appointments a year.
Lorraine Mattis is CEO of the University of Suffolk Dental Community Interest Company (Dental CIC): "Addressing the NHS dental access issues requires a collective effort and we are committed to working in partnership with local practices and the NHS to address these challenges, fundamental to this is fully utilising the multi-skilled dental care workforce.
“Whilst we may not be able to solve this issue alone, we will make a real difference to those in greatest need and support the local community by delivering the best possible dental care and actively promoting oral health improvement.”
Rob Ellis, Associate Dean for Learning, Teaching and Student Experience tells us how they'll be able to help the local community: "Dental therapists that will come out of this programme will be able to take on some of the day to day work that dentists will do...
"That will then free up the relatively small number of dentists we do have to focus on more specialist work."