Sir, while I totally agree with Professor Aubrey Sheiham in his recent editorial (BDJ 2005; 199: 187) that HMG's new NHS short-term contracts and great uncertainty will cause worse NHS dental services, not better, I believe he has stated this conclusion correctly, but for all the wrong reasons!

His opening sentence 'The dramatic improvements in dental health...' simply adds credence to the saying: 'Lies, damn lies and statistics!'

UK dental health is now so bad that the second commonest reason for the UK population to contact NHS Direct for all medical conditions, is toothache.1

There are lengthy queues simply to register with NHS dentists to get even basic, urgent needs attended to, never mind continuing quality care and prevention.2

The 'British mouth' of high disease and bad breath, as it is referred to derogatorily world-wide, is increasing rather than decreasing — the evidence is all around us and any 'scientist' would have to be 'double-blind' to not see this!

In the future, history will have to remind itself these were not Victorian times, but twenty-first century NHS dental services failing to live up to government spin, while being poorly planned and even more poorly resourced. Dental teams' goodwill and hard work simply cannot compensate for such long-standing, continuing incompetence from central government planners!

It was the Government's 'in-house' scientific advice in the late 1980s and a wish to cut costs that closed two UK dental schools and cut NHS Dental funding in 1992 dramatically. Those strategies were clearly wrong and not in the public interest.3

Today we have to import so many 'extra' non-UK dentists that they form the majority by far of new GDC registrants annually and we STILL have a big dental workforce shortage. Professor Aubrey Sheiham's editorial, by deflecting most of our attention onto the increasing proportion of female UK dental graduates and supposedly lower dental treatment needs, is at best misguided and at worst insulting to our female colleagues and the general intelligence of this esteemed journal's readership.

Without doubt if this Government also continues with its plans to perpetuate and further reinforce these serious errors of the last 15 years by massively under-resourcing NHS dentistry, on previous invalid assumptions of fewer future dental needs, rather than the obvious growing mountain of unmet dental needs, then this promised new NHS dental system is still heading for its predictable, catastrophic failure.4

No wonder privately provided, patient-centred dental care and prevention is increasingly attractive to both dental professionals and their patients than the NHS alternative!5

UK dentistry deserves a better thought out and co-coordinated national strategy for overall dental care delivery, than that still based on the failed, past dogmas that continue to treat dentistry as the 'discriminated' Cinderella of NHS services.6

Until that paradigm shift in central Government thinking occurs, this new draft NHS dental contract is still working against the public interest, by design or default.