Sir, I was interested in Peter Swiss's article in the BDJ celebrating the 21st anniversary of Denplan (BDJ 2008; 205: 475–476) but I thought I could provide a bit of historical background. In 1972 Tom Farrell, Keith Marshall, the late Tony Love and I put forward a novel dental insurance scheme which we called the 'Private Dental Scheme'. At that time most of us could see that the NHS was developing into a never-ending treadmill, and the harder you worked, the less you would be paid. Seeing the disadvantages of both the 'piece work' and 'capitation' schemes I had designed a novel system that I thought would work better, similar to an annual 'service' fee you pay your plumber. It was an entirely unknown concept at the time.

I spent about £5,000, a lot of money in those days, to get past the then Board of Trade who wanted to label it an insurance scheme, asking us to put down a deposit of £100,000! Subsequently we took legal advice and had the literature printed (Fig. 1).

Figure 1
figure 1

Private Dental Scheme literature from 1972

Full size image

We held a meeting at the postgraduate centre in Tunbridge Wells in late 1972. A large number of dentists attended but most of them were earning a lot of money in the NHS and did not wish to rock the boat. I do remember the comments of Peter Swiss who said 'You are just changing one authority for another'. Anyway only a handful seemed interested and we filed it. Soon after that Tom became chairman at the Dental Estimates Board and Keith moved to King's Hospital.

Thirteen years later in 1985, the profession had become much less satisfied with Health Service dentistry and I wrote to the BDA re-emphasising the plan's advantages. Peter Swiss replied saying he would put it to the executive and let me know. I sent him all the details of the plan but heard no more.

In his article Peter says 'It was in the mid 1980s, whilst working with me at the Medical Defence Union, that Stephen Nora and Marilyn Orcharton met and devised the idea of a private capitation scheme'. As you would know the initial Denplan was almost identical to our Private Dental Scheme and I thought that some of the credit should go to those who first conceived the idea.