September 2010
Managing Director T A R Morgan
Consultant Editor Derek Watson BDS LDSRCS DGDP Executive Editor Chris Ritchie
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Independently audited circulation: 21,187 1st Jan 2009-31st Dec 2009
IN THIS ISSUE... • Michael Watson • Roger Matthews
• Robinson’s Referrals
• The occlusion myth, part 3: articulators • CODE Column
• BDTA Dental Showcase Preview • Product reviews
www.dental-practice.org Derek Watson Can Andrew pull it off?
going to do now they are “hands-on”. Despite giving a stream of interviews since being
C
appointed, all anybody has been able to get out of Earl Howe is access, quality, centralised commissioning and “Long Live the CQC”. This is because the way that dentistry is organised is going to be very dependent on how the NHS is eventually organised (and general medical practitioners in particular). This latter project is in the hands of Andrew Lansley, the Health Secretary.
Andrew (I call him Andrew) spent six years as opposition Health Secretary, fuming and planning and plotting what he would do when the Conservatives marched back up Whitehall. He has made no secret of his belief that unhealthy foods can be part of a healthy diet or the £1,000 a month he received from Profero, an advertising agency which lists Mars and Pepsi UK as among its clients (he has since resigned). It is difficult to see how dentistry is going to make any progress against the sugar lobby in this climate. Fortunately he has been otherwise occupied strutting around Richmond House abolishing Primary Care Trusts shouting “Resistance is Useless”! It is difficult to think what PCTs did which led to their immediate abolition; until you remember that they are a great fat bloated inefficient ignorant expensive administrative layer interpolated between the taxpayers and the clinicians that actually do the work. The sky gods know that I am the last person to begrudge anybody a job in the current climate, but you can be forgiven for having a quick smile the day you heard that news. The public, bless them, has this quaint idea that the National Health Service is supposed to be national and that is what Andrew is going to give them. Earl Howe, on the other hand, seems to be paralysed by the dentistry brief. Lord Howe, who was educated at Rugby School and Christ Church, Oxford,
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22-38 40
• Computers in Dentistry/Practice Efficiency 46 • Making a dental difference in Bwindi • Dentaid Despatch • CPD
50 52
• Classifieds • The Lux Letter 2
53-54 60 63
It is difficult to think what PCTs did which led to their immediate abolition; until you remember that they are a great fat bloated inefficient ignorant expensive administrative layer interpolated between the taxpayers and the clinicians that actually do the work.
where he read Mods and Greats (whatever that is), who joined Barclays Bank and was a Director of Adam & Co. plc, a Scottish-based private bank, was blatantly the first choice to fit dentistry in between looking after the family estate in south Buckinghamshire and being chairman of the country’s largest association for the fine art and antiques trade. No doubt he is hard at work learning that four crowns don’t make a pound. What the Conservatives have inherited from the Labour Party is their Communications Directorate, a special layer of government dedicated to making sure that government lies win over the truth, to frustrate freedom of information, to squash any hint of a meritocracy and to insulate decision- makers from stakeholders. Not that someone who inherited his seat in the House of Lords from his
cousin needs any insulation from democracy, but somehow I think they will like their shiny new anti-democratic toy and keep it. The other thing they are going to keep is the Care Quality Commission. The
structure is very simple: NIHCE sets the standards. The NHS Commissioning Board will allocate resources to achieve health outcomes. CQC will be the quality inspectorate and Monitor will encourage the private sector to bid for contracts at the NHS tariff in order to keep the whole thing running at market rates. Currently, the way that dentistry is structured (essentially as private subcontractors to the NHS in a free market) means that this new system is unnecessary duplication. We already have our own bloated, inefficient regulators (the GDC and the private Dental Complaints Service), thanks very much. The problem is
ONSIDERING how much they had to say in opposition, the Conservatives have been surprisingly tight-lipped about what they are
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