Kreate Dental boss Dr Mihir Shah discusses the need to expand dental services in Gravesham and Kent to meet growing demand/
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00:00All our research and kind of analysis, we can see that almost one in three families sadly
00:04within the Graysham area are not receiving adequate health care and actually fall below
00:11living standards. So one of the major things that we want to push at Create Dental is to improve
00:17those standards, certainly in terms of oral healthcare services, so that hopefully your
00:23children won't need to have a tooth taken out and won't have to go to A&E and worry about
00:29waiting for endless appointment visits there. You won't have to worry hopefully of tooth decay
00:36because we can spot it early by increasing capacity and by helping supporting and educating
00:42the local area we can hopefully improve oral health standards within the area. But also locally
00:47we can also help with employment as well within our organisation. So there's a number of pressures
00:52that we're seeing. So essentially during COVID and post-pandemic, what we're seeing is that
00:59there are very very long waiting lists. Because dental practices were closed for a period of time
01:05during the pandemic, we weren't able to see patients for almost three, four months.
01:09This has created long waiting lists. In addition to that, following the opening of the practices
01:15during the pandemic, we weren't, due to government guidance, allowed to see as many patients as we
01:21would like. So as a result of that, because of the decontamination times required, even though
01:28dentistry is as safe as an operating theatre, we couldn't see the same volume of patients as we
01:35were before the COVID pandemic. So this has meant that there are very very long backlogs of waiting
01:41lists, particularly for NHS care. And hopefully by expanding our services within the area,
01:47with great well-trained local clinicians, we'll be able to ease some of those pressures within that clinic.