Thousands of NHS dental procedures have been cancelled in Medway over the last two years with more than 1.1 million not performed.

It comes as half of all dentists based in the Towns say they won’t do any more NHS work due to financial pressures, “too much bureaucracy” and difficulty with recruiting and retaining staff.

At a health and adult social care (HASC) overview and scrutiny committee on March 14, councillors heard about the dismal NHS dental provision and asked what was being done to fix it.

A report presented by Sukh Singh, director of primary and community care for NHS Kent and Medway Integrated Care Board (ICB) showed many areas are deprived of NHS dentistry.

It also detailed how dentists who had taken on NHS contracts were cancelling them, with more than 23,000 agreed units of dental activity (UDA) being terminated since April last year.

Strood represented the highest number, with 12,160 UDAs, Gillingham with 6019, and Chatham 5213.

In a survey of 79 dentists and dental care professionals in Medway, they said reasons for wanting to cancel the NHS contracts were because of financial pressures, too much bureaucracy and paperwork, and difficulty with recruitment and retention.

Three quarters of those performing NHS dentistry services surveyed said they had considered giving up on the contracts in the past year and half said they would likely stop delivering NHS services in the next 12 months.

When asked about the morale of dentists, and why they were leaving NHS work, Caroline Batistoni, secretary of the Kent Local Dental Committee and a practising dentist in Tonbridge, said it was because of unfulfilled promises of improvement.

She said: “Morale is very low in the dental profession because we’ve had years of hoping for change and progress is glacially slow and it’s a very hard system to work in.

“The vast majority of dentists want to do the best for people, that’s why we go into it, and we’re trying our best.

“The ICB are trying their best to work within the constraints that they have, but it’s hard.”

Chairman of the HASC committee, Cllr Dan McDonald (Lab), expressed frustration key information was missing, including waiting lists.

He said: “I am surprised we can’t get waiting lists from our dentists in Medway.

“We’re not talking about 100s of dentists here.

“If I’d have known we couldn’t have got the waiting lists here this evening I would have rung them myself to find out who’s open to NHS patients and who isn’t - I suspect not many are.

“The big issue for residents in Medway is the waiting list or not being able to see an NHS dentist.

“We just had it in Faversham recently, where they queued for two days round the block to try and register for an NHS dentist.

He added: “I really am frustrated that we haven’t got that figure today.

“I call you here, part of a dentistry service, and no-one can tell me out of the dentists we have in Medway how many are accepting NHS patients and how many are not. No-one knows.

“We wouldn’t get resolution for our residents even if you did have that information, because probably the answer is none of our dentists are accepting.

“Surely, as a commissioning body, you want to do better.”

Representatives from the ICB said there are some schemes coming from national government which are trying to incentivise dentists taking on new NHS patients, including the new patient premium which provides additional funding.

However, Mr Singh said they were paying close attention to measure how successful this was in helping areas where people are unable to get seen and adjusting accordingly.