Bradford MP calls for urgent action to avoid dental crisis

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The MP for Bradford South has called on the government to take urgent action in a bid to avoid a dental crisis in her constituency. Labour MP Judith Cummins has encouraged ministers to act quickly while speaking at a debate in the House of Commons.

The debate took place after a Freedom of Information request revealed that 190 children in the city received hospital treatment for dental problems between April and December 2016. Ms Cummins requested the data from Bradford Teaching Hospitals.

The news comes after BBC research suggested that there was a national issue with dental access. Researchers discovered that half of practices listed on the NHS Choices weren’t accepting new adult patients and in Bradford, only 3 clinics were found to be offering places for NHS treatment.

Talking about the situation, Ms Cummins said that the government “should be ashamed that almost 40,000 children were admitted to hospital to have multiple teeth extracted” in the space of a single year.

The cost of an extraction is around £834 and Ms Cummins accused the government of wasting more than £50 million on treatment for preventable dental decay. Dental disease is the most common cause of child hospital admissions in the UK.

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