A woman unable to get a dentist appointment decided to take matters into her own hands – by pulling out 11 teeth herself.

Danielle Watts, from Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, says her old practice never referred her and her children elsewhere after closing its doors six years ago.

While there were no major issues to begin with, she has experienced serious problems with her teeth over the past two and a half years.

They have made simple things like eating unbearable without painkillers and stripped her of the confidence to even smile.

Speaking to BBC Look East, she said: ‘I’ve just had nowhere to turn. Everywhere I’ve tried has said they are not taking on NHS patients, but offered to take us on privately.

‘I wouldn’t know where to get the funds from or where to begin to go privately.’

Much like the NHS and court system, the coronavirus pandemic has left dental practices with severe backlogs of patients needing appointments.

Dentists say that limits on the number they can see each day means they cannot get through the same volumes as before.

And that has forced many to turn private in order to pay wages and meet equipment costs.

Dr Meetal Patel, who owns the Aylsham Dental Practice in Norfolk, told the BBC: ‘In terms of NHS dentistry, trying to maintain the same level is very, very difficult.’

He added; ‘At the moment I don’t really see how a business can survive just doing NHS work.’

The difficulty, Dr Patel said, ‘is because of the virus and how we are having to work, we cannot do the volumes that we were doing before’.

He said: ‘The problem was bad enough before Covid and it has become a lot worse since Covid. It is not going away, it is escalating.’

Tracey Bambridge, the dental nurse and receptionist at the Aylsham practice, added: ‘People are really angry, they are asking why we can’t see them on the NHS.

‘It is not that we don’t want to see them, it is just that down to physically how many people we are able to see in a day and we just cannot see the volume of patients that we could before.’

Dr Dipali Chokshi, a dentist at the March Dental Practice in Cambridgeshire, said waiting lists in NHS practices ‘have gone through the roof’.

He said the backlog for routine appointments at his practice was ‘about a year’ before the pandemic and has now risen to ‘two to three years’.

Dr Chokshi said emergency patients are waiting ‘two or three months’ to be seen, adding: ‘If you’re in pain, that’s intolerable.’

In response to reports of backlogs back in August, NHS England’s chief dental officer Sara Hurley said: ‘It’s inevitable that the upheaval caused by Covid has disrupted some people’s dental care but dentists have been prioritising treatment for patients in urgent need, in part through the rapid establishment of 600 urgent dental centres – with millions still getting care through the pandemic.

‘The NHS has put to good use additional resources to tackle Covid and recover all services – with NHS dental teams working hard to see patients as quickly and safely as possible and provision of urgent care has been at pre-pandemic levels since December.’

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