Social Democrats<\/a> and chair of the committee, said it was seven years since the National Oral Health Policy was published. <\/p>\n\u201cWe are still waiting for an implementation plan,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cSince 2019, the situation has only deteriorated. Alarm bells should be going off in the department but the fact of the matter is, public dental services have never been a priority.<\/p>\n
\u201cReform is always talked about, but it never materialises. This must urgently change. Promises of dental reform are no longer enough \u2013 it\u2019s time for the Minister for Health to act. I am calling on the Minister to accept and implement the health committee\u2019s 19 recommendations in full.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Irish Dental Association said the report reflected the \u201curgent need for meaningful reform\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis report supports our view that significant investment is required to achieve meaningful reforms which offer sufficient access, coverage and quality of care to the general population, particularly those experiencing socioeconomic disadvantage,\u201d the association said.<\/p>\n
In submissions to the committee, the Department of Health said it invested more than \u20ac240 million annually in the provision of oral healthcare and targeted those most in need of State support to access care.<\/p>\n
It said progress on the reform of oral health services was \u201cimpacted by the pandemic amongst other things\u201d and has been \u201cslower than anticipated\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cHowever, to support a focused and structured implementation of the policy, the department and the HSE are currently developing a three-year implementation plan for the first phase to guide an acceleration of reforms,\u201d the briefing said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis plan will be finalised and published in the coming months.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The structure and funding of public dental services have been \u201cbadly neglected\u201d, a new report has said, with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":402401,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[144386,103,397,396,61,60],"class_list":["post-402400","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-healthcare","tag-dental-council","tag-health","tag-health-care","tag-healthcare","tag-ie","tag-ireland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/402400","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=402400"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/402400\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/402401"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=402400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=402400"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=402400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}