To ask the Secretary of State for Health how many dental patients have contracted notifiable diseases following treatment with inadequately sterilised instruments in each of the last five years. [113549]
We are not aware of any such incidents.
To ask the Secretary of State for Health if he will make a statement on plans to establish further dental access centres in Portsmouth and South East Hampshire. [115553]
Dental access centres have been a centrally funded initiative, running as personal dental services pilots (PDS) under the NHS (Primary Care) Act 1997. There have been four waves of PDS, the last one in 2001.
There are no plans for further waves of similar centrally funded PDS pilots. Legislation is currently before Parliament to effect far reaching reform of National Health Service dentistry. As part of this reform programme, resources currently held centrally to pay for primary care dentistry will become part of primary care trust (PCT) allocations and PCTs will be given:
a duty to provide primary dental services to the extent they consider reasonable
the powers to invest from their own resources into primary care dentistry.
It will therefore be for each PCT to decide whether, in their local circumstances, further dental access centres are an appropriate response.
To ask the Secretary of State for Health what percentage of pregnant women received free dental treatment on the NHS in the North Shropshire constituency in the last 12 months for which figures are available. [116340]
2,026 women who received dental treatment in the general dental service (GDS) in Shropshire Health Authority in the year to December 2002 were exempt from patient charges because they were pregnant.In addition 634 claims were made by women who received dental treatment in the personal dental service in the year to March 2003; the number of women these claims relate to could be slightly smaller than 634.There were 2,696 maternities in Shropshire in the year 2002.