Dentistry under general anaesthetic 'grotesquely under-resourced', warns leading dentist

Children and adults with disabilities as well as people with severe anxiety or other health issues need this service for having dental care. File picture

The service offering dental care under general anaesthetic is “grotesquely under-resourced” around the country, a leading dentist working at Cork University Dental Hospital has warned.

Children and adults with disabilities as well as people with severe anxiety or other health issues need this service for having dental care. This could be extractions, fillings or other care.

Dr Catherine Gallagher called for more hospitals to provide operating theatre time to dentists.

“We do have the staff to see these patients but getting into theatre is challenging. It’s not the dentists who are in short supply generally, certainly not with us, it’s access to the full team,” she said.

A team including an anaesthetist and nurses supports dentists giving this treatment, she explained. “That service is grotesquely under-resourced,” she said.

She estimated the Cork dental hospital’s waiting list for this is at “around four years” now.

“The bulk of what is on our waiting lists would be children so under-16s. And we have close on 500 in total, not just for extractions,” she said. 

We have over 400 under-16s waiting and we’ve 85 adults. 

Patients are categorised as urgent — meaning life-threatening situations — semi-urgent and non-urgent based on referral letters. “We have 231 patients categorised as semi-urgent at the moment and 102 of those are six or under,” she said.

A key issue was the dental team had limited access to theatre time at Cork University Hospital until February. “We have just last month got additional theatre time, we now have an additional three days. We had two of those days now so we have just started,” she said.

“It obviously hasn’t started long enough to make any impact on the waiting lists. Before we got this extra time if I were to divide the number of patients we were doing per week into the number on the waiting list, our waiting list comes at around four years.” 

The pressure on theatre slots reflects what is happening in other overcrowded hospitals, the Irish Dental Association also warned last week.

She is “very grateful” to everyone who helped make the additional days possible, saying “(they are) doing their best to support our efforts to re-establish the level of service we provided in the past.”

However, the crisis nationally means dentists are only treating the most urgent cases.

“We are hopeful that (the extra hours) will make a big difference because at the moment all we’re doing is the smallest amount of fire-fighting, just seeing the patients in the most dire need,” she said.

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Dentistry under general anaesthetic is also done by the HSE dental service in St Finbarr’s Hospital with a separate service in Mallow.

Another key issue was the suspension of an arrangement between the HSE and Aut Even hospital in Kilkenny. This meant those patients were travelling to Cork instead.

A spokesman for the HSE Dublin South East told the Irish Examiner just days ago this lapsed arrangement is being renewed at least for orthodontic patients.

This follows a focus on the waiting lists after the parents of an autistic boy in Waterford, Tiernan Power Murphy, were told of a potential 10-year wait to have teeth extracted.