This week Falmouth and Truro MP Cherilyn Mackrory announced with much fanfare that the government was finally tackling the crisis in NHS dentistry in the UK.

The contract changes, which came into force this week, will provide fairer payments to dentists by taking into account the time taken to do the work, incentivising practices to provide the care needed for patients with complex and high needs.

Now, while that is all well and good, if there are no dentists taking NHS patients anymore how is that going to work exactly?

We may need a fairer payment system, but that doesn’t help people who can’t find an NHS dentist to treat them?

People living in Cornwall have long given up on the idea that will ever get onto an NHS dentist list, it’s a dentistry desert. And that is really scary.

With the majority of people in Cornwall on appallingly low wages, they cannot afford to go private and end up suffering in agony or doing their own amateur dentistry with all kinds of consequences.

One NHS practice in Falmouth has such trouble recruiting it doesn’t actually have any dentists! How is that sustainable?