COVID-19 INFORMATION

Meeting 3rd March 2021

ONLINE MEETING VIA WEBEX

WEDNESDAY 3rd March 2021

 7.30 START

MINUTES

  1. Attendees:

 Patrik Zachrisson - LDC Chairman & Treasurer

 Amiras Chokshi - Secretary

 Mariana De Villiers - LDC Administrator

 Jaco Craig

Claire Jackman

Peter Mullins

Gawain King

Meeraj Patel

Marlise De Vos

Bharpur Sanghera

Julia Hallam-Seagrave

  1. Apologies:

       Deepak Kumar

       Avtar Pardesi

       Francis Scriven

  1. Chairman’s Report: Patrik Zachrisson:

Patrik Zachrisson hosted the LDC online meeting on Wednesday evening, 3rd March 2021 at 7.00 pm via Cisco Webex.

Minutes of Meeting held on 9th December 2020 was confirmed.

Contract Activity:

The UDA contract activity requirements for the period 1st January 2021 to 31st March 2021, dictated that practices need to be working towards delivering reduced activity levels for the remainder of the contract year, with a requirement to deliver a minimum 45% of contractual monthly activity between January and March.

For UOA activity, providers are expected to achieve 70% between January and March.

This will be deemed to be equivalent to 100% of usual contract activity in this period for year-end clawback calculations.

It was noted that some Associates reflected that they only need to deliver 45% of their normal workload and were unwilling to work beyond those levels.  However, most Associates work “as normal” according to patient need and capacity.

Currently Associate shortages remains a problem as European Dentists are not coming to work in the UK and some European Dentists are retuning back to Europe.

8.00am to 8.00pm 365 days a year Dental Care:

NHS England has approached dental service providers to express an interest for future tendering in offering extended excess hours for routine and urgent care. This is to ensure that patients across the area can benefit from easier access to urgent and routine NHS Dental Care close to where they live, which will then replace the existing Dental Out of Hours Service and Dental Access Centres.  Practices to provide urgent and routine dental care over extended hours, for example 8am to 8pm Monday to Friday, and extended access cover over weekends and Bank Holidays excluding Christmas Day, New Year’s Day and Easter Sunday.

There are currently 5 Dental Practices in Leicestershire and Rutland providing 8.00am to 8.00pm urgent dental care alongside normal routine care: care Leicester Westcotes ward, Leicester Castle ward, Loughborough, Melton Mowbray and Oakham

Orthodontic update:

The Local Area Team (LAT) are holding a "lessons learnt” exercise to determine where the previous tender process went wrong and how errors experienced could be avoided in future.

A proposal to engage with the various stakeholders in order to determine how to undertake a new procurement exercise is planned.

  1. Treasurer’s Report – Patrik Zachrisson

The Cambridgeshire and Peterborough LDC continues to be financially stable and secure.  

The LDC are looking into the possibility of supporting courses for dental nurses. However, due to the pandemic this would not be possible for some time. There are currently no training courses for Dental Nurses in Peterborough.

The LDC has agreed to make a contribution to the Benevolent Fund.

  1. Secretary’s Report – Amiras Chokshi:

Amiras Chokshi attended The General Dental Practitioners Committee meeting on 29th January 2021 via videoconference. The GDPC elected Shawn Charlwood as Chair.

A major point of discussion was the expectation from NHS England for Dental Practices to produce 45% of contract value and the use of UDAs to measure this.

The activity figures for December did not indicate that practices would be able to achieve the 45 per cent target. NHS England are eagerly awaiting the figures for January assuming that these figures would reflect better results.  NHS England has not shared the full modelling on which its view that 45 per cent was achievable was based

Abatement: Negotiations with NHS England on whether the payments in relation to the 55 per cent of activity that practices were not undertaken should be abated, are ongoing.  This was being contested vociferously, as delivering 45 per cent of activity did not reduce practice costs by 55 per cent.

Across the UK:

  • It is worth noting that NHS dentists in Northern Ireland are now subject to a 15 per cent target.
  • In Scotland pre-existing arrangements would be maintained and the implementation of a target for activity would be delayed by three months.
  • In Wales, there would be no target on the number of AGPs practices would be expected to provide, Practices only sees emergencies.

Associate pay remains a controversial discussion point.  Associates were reportedly coming under pressure to perform far more work than they were originally contracted for whilst others underperform.  Principals having to take all the risks.

For continued updates on latest developments the BDA is providing live updates at www.bda.org/coronavirus.

The full Report of the GDPC Meeting is available on the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough LDC Website.

A number of practices who applied for reimbursement of PPE did not meet the criteria and many applications were rejected.

  1. Special Care Dentistry: Julia Hallam-Seagrave

Dental Access Centres are very busy.  They have experienced more requests for urgent treatment than they can deal with.

Referral rates are back to normal. However, it is worth noting that there are not many referrals for special care adults and children with special needs eg. Autism.

It was also noted that some Dental practices have experienced difficulty in ascertaining the ages of children in care. Ages of children given appear to be quite questionable.

Access for General Anaesthetic (GA) are very limited. Peterborough Hospital currently have 2 lists per month for Dental GA and none available at Addenbrookes. NHS England are aware of the long waiting lists.

  1. Other Business

Occupational Health remains a subject for discussion. Generally, most of the large hospitals will have a contract for occupational health.

Occupational health providers should establish clear links where they do not already exist, and work closely with health and safety leads, infection prevention teams and local health protection teams. They should keep up to date with the most current government information and advice and good practice guidance from the NHS Health at Work Network. 

  1. Next Meeting:

 7th July 2021.

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