STV have now covered our petition, and we have also featured in the Stornoway Gazette. https://stv.tv/news/highlands-islands/1381394-severe-island-dentist-shortage-hits-patients-on-lewis/ http://www.stornowaygazette.co.uk/news/health/petition-set-up-in-protest-over-dentist-issues-1-4373907 We want to say an ESPECIALLY BIG THANK-YOU to the Stornoway Gazette for including a link to this petition in their article. That is warmly appreciated. We are grateful to them for stepping up to the role of helping so many of us on this island in seeking to obtain our RIGHT to NHS dental registration. This has gone on so long now that this petition is by far the best way to proceed. If enough people sign it and report on it, then we have a good chance of victory. STV quote the Scottish Government as saying that NHS Western Isles is making "continuous efforts" to improve local dental services, and that "We are committed to ensuring that patients who wish to have access to NHS dental services are able to do so." Great. Well we want "access to NHS dental services" here where we live, on Lewis. So if you're committed to ensuring that we get it, Mr Unnamed Spokesman, that means we'll get it by when exactly? Please don't ever forget that the Health Board has admitted that it was approached by the unnamed dentist who may possibly set up a practice on the island by October 2017. Exactly the same was said in 2015 and nothing materialised. Indeed when the new Dental Services building was opened in 2011, the motivation was supposed to be to clear the registration waiting-list. Yet thousands of us are waiting. Is the Health Board actually serious? Can't they ADVERTISE A CONTRACT? Why do they have to wait until someone approaches THEM and then suggest that everything may possibly be OK eventually because they're negotiating with a single person? This problem has gone on for years and it needs to be sorted out at Scottish Government level. If heads have to be cracked together at the Health Board, so be it. If more funding is needed, so be it. We don't care how it happens. What we do care about is that someone gives the instruction that this problem be solved. Vague statements of hope aren't good enough. Don't anyone tell us it's impossible. If necessary, as a backstop, the armed forces employ dentists. If you're in uniform, you have to go where you're told. If Tesco's stopped bringing food lorries to the island - and they're a private company, so they can stop if they want - would the Scottish Government let us starve? We are fed up with officials throwing up their hands and saying there's nothing they can do for certain, but they are "committed" to "ensuring" "access to services" and so on. Of course we want access to services. Teeth-fixing services. Also known as dentists. And we want commitment. Also known as a promise that a solution will materialise, as a matter of certainty, by such-and-such a date. We don't want to be strung along any more. At the moment, we haven't even got a promise that we'll be allowed to register in the next 20 years. We have a right to be registered as NHS patients, without having to make an eight-hour round trip to Inverness once or twice or three times every three months. (That's two and a half hours each way on the ferry, and one and a half hours each way on the road from Ullapool, not counting any travel on this side of the Minch.) That means we have a right to be registered HERE ON THIS ISLAND. THAT'S what we want the Scottish Government to commit to. THAT's what this petition is all about. Clearly we aren't there yet. So please PLEASE tell everyone you know about this petition. When it gets 5000 or 10000 signatures, the Scottish Government will HAVE to respond with more than just fine bureaucratic words. THANK YOU TO EVERYONE WHO HAS SIGNED AND HELPED SO FAR! We are not YET being taken seriously. This is why