- Outrage when the Highland surgery closed its doors due to lack of staff
Thousands of people will be forced to make a 150 mile round trip for a dental check-up after it emerged a clinic in the Highlands is to close.
Patients are facing chaos after the Old Sick Bay surgery in Kyle of Lochalsh, Ross-shire, closed in August.
The practice said it had to make the difficult decision after failing to recruit a new dentist.
The only other clinic in the village that has one NHS service closed last year.
Patients will soon have to seek treatment from dentists as far away as Inverness or Dingwall – if they have space to take them on as NHS patients.
The Old Sick Bay Dental Practice, Kyle of Lochalsh, which is set to close
Patients in the Kyle of Lochalsh area will have to make an arduous journey to see an NHS dentist
Conservative MSP Jamie Halcro Johnston said rural communities were being “left behind, with many local health services downgraded or lost entirely”.
He added: ‘This forces rural Scotland residents to travel hundreds of miles to attend appointments and for many this is made even more difficult due to the poor state of local roads and the lack of public transport.
‘This will lead to many Scots in rural areas missing important appointments and needing emergency dental treatment in A&E, which will only increase the pressure on our NHS.’
Kyle and Lochalsh Community Trust chairman Maggie Cunningham told the BBC: ‘The whole thing is so pointless and people here are frustrated.’
The closure of the Old Sick Bay practice, an independent clinic with a nationally agreed NHS contract, will leave its approximately 4,000 patients scrambling to find a new dentist.
According to the NHS Highland website, the nearest practice accepting NHS patients is 70 miles away in Fort William, which would mean a three-hour return journey.
With only a handful of available places, other patients will be forced to travel as far as Kingussie.
In a letter seen by this newspaper, patients are told that the practice will close on August 31.
It said: ‘This difficult decision has been made after many months of unprecedented uncertainty for our patients and the compounding factor of exceptional staff shortages due to the pandemic which has resulted in a national dentist shortage and we have been unable to find a replacement dentist recruit. ‘
NHS Highland said emergency care for unregistered patients with urgent needs can be arranged through the public dental service.
The problems faced by patients in Kyle come amid a wider crisis in dental services in Scotland. Reports suggest that almost 82 per cent of NHS dentists in Scotland are no longer taking new patients.
The problems in the Highlands stem from a wider recruitment crisis in Scotland’s dental services
The British Dental Association (BDA) in Scotland, a trade union, has said the system has been in crisis for a generation and wants a shift to a patient-centred, prevention-oriented model.
Dentistry in Scotland is facing a recruitment crisis as young practitioners are lured into cosmetic work rather than taking on the demands of an NHS clinic.
It is said that recruits are put off by the ‘treadmill’ style of NHS work and five-day weeks, and instead go private or abroad.
Last month, David McColl, chairman of the BDA’s Scottish Dental Practice Committee, said: ‘Trying to recruit dentists to the NHS is probably the worst it has ever been and I have been working as an NHS dentist for 37 years.’
The Scottish Government said it has made grants and grants available to support NHS Highland in recruiting dentists.
It said it was working with the health board to improve access for affected patients.
