Dear Toothless Supporters

As you may have noticed, the petition is doing really well, but we will not win this by petition numbers alone!

Having had a specific meeting with a group from the ICB, it has become clear that there are several next steps we need to do.

Firstly, we need to continue to collect people's experiences as we need to be able to demonstrate, with evidence, that this is an urgent need. My email is emmajking.sos4somerset@gmail.com for this.

Secondly, we need to lobby government to change the National Contract. This was created in 2006 and has not been changed since. It is the reason why many dentists cannot afford to take on NHS patients. Any work done by a dentist under the National Contract is paid for in UDAs (Units of Dental Activity). These units are £28 and one unit would be applied for a check up. If this check up lasts 45 minutes or 5 minutes, it is still only one UDA. A UDA does not pay for a dental nurse. Clearly a dentist cannot do work, such as a filling, without the help of a dental nurse and, in order to retain good dental nurses, a dentist under an NHS contract will have to pay one out of their own money.  Our MP is Sarah Dyke and can be contacted here: sarah.dyke.mp@parliament.uk. I urge you to contact her over this matter. (It is worth mentioning that the idea of mobile dentistry will not work as the amount of work a mobile dentist could do would be very limited and so they would still need to be referred to an NHS dentist, so we would be back to square one.)

I will be creating letters and leaflets about this campaign shortly, but, by all means, publicise this issue as widely as you can! The more people who get on board the better.

Thank you everyone - together we will win this!