[Report 1959] / School Medical Officer, Northamptonshire County Council.

  • Northamptonshire (England). County Council.
Date:
1959
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Credit: [Report 1959] / School Medical Officer, Northamptonshire County Council. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    deep rooted and of long standing. . . . The shortage is not of a kind which can cure itself and its consequences now are more serious than they were when the Teviot Committee reported, so that its cure is more urgent and difficult.” Part I of the Ministry of Health Report for 1957 states : “ The shortage of dentists is bound to become more acute before measures to increase dental manpower can bear fruit. . . . Twenty-eight per cent of the dental profession are 60 or over. . . . A large proportion of dentists is in the higher age group, which makes it unlikely that the rate of entry into the profession will be able to keep pace, in the immediate future, with the loss through retirement and death.” The situation is not uniform throughout the country and the Midlands is the worst area in respect of the number of dentists practising under the National Health Service per 1,000 population. The ratio there is one dentist per 5,900 people whereas, in contrast, London and the South-East have one dentist per 3,100. In North¬ amptonshire itself, including the Borough of Northampton, there are some 80 dentists serving a population of approximately 384,300, giving a ratio of one dentist per 4,800 people. Several of these dentists are near retiring age. Although this is not as bad as else¬ where in the Midlands it is certainly far worse than other areas in the country such as London and the South-East. The Report of the Chief Medical Officer of the Ministry of Health for 1958 indicates that the number of courses of treatment received by children under 15 rose from 7% of the total treated by prac¬ titioners in the general dental service in 1949 to 30% in 1958. Despite this improvement the Report states that ”... it is clear from the statistics that insufficient cafe is given to the children’s teeth ”. A recent survey of some 2,600 school children seen at routine dental inspections in Northamptonshire showed that only 23% apparently received regular dental care by dentists in the National Health Service. In 1958 our own Service (consisting of only six dental officers) treated approximately 9,000 children out of the school population of 44,000. On the assumption that the figure of 23% is representative all over Northamptonshire, the private practitioners would have seen about 10,000. Thus 25,000 children