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This Week in Dentistry: 5 key Dental news stories Dentists should know about.
- Dr Dan Shaffer
- Aug 16
- 5 min read
Staying informed on the latest developments in dentistry isn’t just good business it’s essential for making sound decisions about your practice’s future. Here’s this week’s curated round up of the most important UK dental news, with quick, actionable insights for Dentists.
📊 Summary Table
Headline | Potential Impact |
Registered dental therapists increase by 52% | Expanding workforce capacity and delegation opportunities |
Dentist struck off for forging patient complaints | Highlights the critical importance of professional integrity |
NHS to monitor community dentistry waiting times | Greater transparency could drive funding and reform |
Overseas dentists working in fast food amid NHS backlog | Wasted talent while patient access crisis deepens |
Hair-based keratin toothpaste shows promise for enamel repair | Potentially disruptive innovation in preventive dentistry |
📰 Story 1: Registered Dental Therapists Increase by 52%
The General Dental Council (GDC) has reported a significant surge in the number of registered dental therapists, with a 52% increase over the past two years, bringing the total to 8,459. This growth reflects a broader shift in the profession as practices look to expand their teams beyond dentists, making greater use of dental care professionals (DCPs).
Dental nurses also saw growth, surpassing 65,000 registrants, underlining their role as the backbone of most practices. However, not all professions experienced growth — dental technicians registered a decline, reflecting the increasing reliance on digital workflows and outsourced lab work.
Business Insight:
For practice owners, this shift represents both opportunities and challenges. With more dental therapists available, there’s greater potential to delegate routine restorative and preventive work, freeing up dentists to focus on higher-value treatments. This can increase productivity, reduce patient waiting times, and improve profitability. However, success depends on creating business models that maximise therapist utilisation while ensuring compliance with scope-of-practice regulations.
📰 2: Dentist Struck Off for Forging Complaints
This week, the GDC struck off a dentist for fabricating patient complaints against colleagues during a fitness-to-practise process. The regulator described the conduct as “deliberate, dishonest, and damaging,” underlining how integrity remains central to professional standards.
While rare, such cases gain significant attention because they highlight the potential impact of poor governance on patient safety and professional trust. For colleagues caught in fabricated allegations, the consequences could have been career-threatening without due regulatory process.
Business Insight:
For practice owners and dental business leaders, the lesson is clear: maintaining ethical standards is not just about patient safety but also about safeguarding organisational culture and reputation. In an era where patients are more informed and reviews spread rapidly online, one case of misconduct can tarnish the credibility of an entire practice. Owners must ensure they have clear internal policies, transparent complaints handling, and training in ethics and governance.
Ethics isn’t a “nice to have” — it is a business-critical risk management tool.
📰 3: NHS to Monitor Community Dentistry Waiting Times
NHS England has announced that, for the first time, it will begin collecting and publishing national waiting time data for community dental services (CDS). This move aims to provide transparency about the scale of delays faced by patients with complex needs, such as children requiring general anaesthesia, people with disabilities, and vulnerable groups who rely heavily on community services.
Until now, the absence of standardised data has made it difficult to fully understand or address the backlog in community dentistry. With national monitoring in place, policy-makers and commissioners will have clearer insight into where resources are most needed.
Business Insight:
For dental businesses, this could signal both opportunities and challenges. On one hand, increased transparency may lead to additional funding, reforms, or commissioning of contracts to deliver services. On the other, it may highlight systemic inequalities that put pressure on local providers.
Private and mixed practices should watch this space closely — greater demand for community services often has knock-on effects on private care, with patients opting to self-fund rather than wait. That creates opportunities for practices positioned to provide accessible treatment at scale.
📰 Story 4: Overseas Dentists Working in Fast Food
A striking story from The Guardian this week revealed that thousands of fully-qualified overseas dentists are working in fast food outlets and other low-paid roles because of bottlenecks in the Overseas Registration Exam (ORE). With limited exam places available, many highly-trained professionals are unable to practise, even as more than 4.5 million people in England remain without access to NHS dental care.
This mismatch between available talent and patient need has been described as a “shameful waste” by the Association of Dental Groups (ADG), which is calling for urgent reform of the system.
Business Insight:
For practice owners, this story underlines the severity of the workforce crisis. While recruitment is difficult, there is a latent pool of talent ready to contribute to UK dentistry — if regulatory pathways are streamlined. Any future reforms that enable faster onboarding of overseas dentists could transform workforce planning, expand services, and ease recruitment struggles.
In the meantime, practices will continue to face staffing shortages, making effective retention strategies and optimised use of DCPs more important than ever.
📰 5: Hair-Based Keratin Toothpaste Could Regenerate Enamel
Researchers at King’s College London have revealed a novel toothpaste made with keratin derived from human hair that shows potential for rebuilding tooth enamel. Early laboratory results suggest that keratin can remineralise enamel surfaces, offering a sustainable and regenerative alternative to conventional treatments for cavities.
While still in the experimental stage, the breakthrough highlights the ongoing innovation in dental materials and preventive care. If commercialised, such a toothpaste could reduce reliance on drilling and filling, dramatically changing the patient experience.
Business Insight:
For dental businesses, keeping an eye on these developments is essential. Enamel-regenerating products could shift demand patterns, reducing restorative workload but opening new opportunities in preventive care and retail sales. Forward-thinking practices may wish to align early with such innovations to position themselves as leaders in patient-centred, minimally invasive dentistry.
🙌 Dental news: Why It Matters
This week’s stories highlight dentistry at a crossroads: workforce growth in some areas but underutilised talent in others, governance lessons from misconduct cases, and the promise of breakthrough innovations.
For dental professionals and practice owners, the message is clear: success depends on agility — whether that’s embracing new roles within the team, preparing for future technologies, or navigating the pressures of NHS reform.
Thank you for reading This Week in Dentistry. Join us again next week for another roundup of the stories that matter most to UK dentistry.
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