Dentists call time on year-long waits for child tooth extractions
Some waiting over 36 months in pain for care.
The British Dental Association Scotland has urged politicians, policymakers and health practitioners to refocus their efforts on bringing down waiting times for tooth extractions among children, currently the most common reason for their hospital admission.
According to evidence gathered in a new report, in the quarter ending March 2025 around 1 in 4 patients were waiting more than a year to receive their dental treatment under a general anaesthetic (GA), often experiencing pain and dental infections during this time. The longest waiting times exceeded three years.
The BDA said the patients are falling victim to a failed recovery in elective care. Fewer patients are being admitted every quarter than pre-COVID, at a time when the number of patients with ongoing waits has more than doubled.
In 2022, the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care set out key targets for NHS Scotland, which included a target to treat patients waiting longer than one year for inpatient / day cases in most specialties by the end of September 2024. At a national level this target has not been met for these dental GA waiting lists.
The BDA said there needs to be a ‘shared responsibility’ in relation to tackling these waiting lists, requiring a cross sectoral engagement within both dentistry and medicine, in collaboration with Health Boards and the Scottish Government.
It says that enduring challenges associated with dental GA waiting times in Scotland underscores the urgent need for comprehensive reforms in dental workforce planning, appropriate funding, and service delivery development, to ensure timely and equitable access to these GA services for all of these patients.
Albert Yeung, Chair of the BDA’s Scottish Council said: “We shouldn’t accept that tooth decay remains the number one reason for hospital admissions among children in Scotland.
“Solving this problem will require politicians, policymakers and practitioners to take shared responsibility. They each have a moral duty to put prevention first, to keep NHS services afloat, and to ensure dentists in our hospitals aren’t left fighting for priority and theatre space.
“Failure to act here will come at a terrible price – a multi-million-pound cost for our NHS, and more yearlong waits for thousands of our children.”