Bristol Dental Hospital's operations waiting list triples

The number of patients needing major operations at Bristol Dental Hospital has tripled during the pandemic.

A Freedom of Information request showed some patients had been left in agony for as long as two years.

In October 2019, 1,879 patients were waiting longer than 18 weeks reaching a peak of 6,892 in July. Last month's figures show 4,546 people were waiting.

Bristol Dental Hospital said it had continued to provide emergency treatment throughout the pandemic.

When the first national lockdown began in March all non-urgent treatment was cancelled because of the high risk of transmission of Covid-19 through aerosol generating procedures.

A hospital spokesperson said: "In 2019 and early-2020 we saw an increase in dental referrals, which has led to longer waiting times.

"This has been exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic, which meant that, following national guidelines, all routine dental care was suspended in England between March and June 2020."

The hospital then had to reduce the volume of patients it would normally see due to social distancing and infection control measures.

Weekend appointments are now being offered to reduce waiting list times for routine dental appointments.

Jill Howard's daughter Esmay, 11, whose dentist is in the Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire, has waited more than eight months to get a tooth removed.

She said her daughter had been told to "just self-medicate".

"One night she completely overdosed and was being violently sick the next day and I couldn't work out why, and then I'd realised she'd overdosed and still the dentist wouldn't see her," she said.

"She's finally having treatment next Tuesday and that's only because she's had a referral from the orthodontist and the orthodontist has said, 'get this tooth out'."

Chair of the Bristol Dental Association, Eddie Crouch said: "Obviously with this situation where many practices are only seeing about 50% of the volume of patients that they were seeing back in February, that problem is likely to get much worse."

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