Reforms to NHS dentistry are failing, the British Dental Association said yesterday as thousands of would-be patients besieged a practice near Portsmouth offering NHS care.

In scenes more typical of the January sales, patients arrived at first light at a new practice in Titchfield Common, Hampshire. Before the doors had opened, 2,000 people had registered online and over the phone. Hundreds more arrived in an attempt to grab the 1,000 remaining places. By the time the surgery opened at 10am, the queue stretched around the block.

Manori Ambrose, who set up the surgery, said: “There are a lot of people who need a dentist who are not even on the waiting list.”

The British Dental Association (BDA) wrote to Barry Cockroft, the Chief Dental Officer of England, yesterday and called for changes to the dental contract, which has been in force for a year.

The letter, from Lester Ellman, chairman of the BDA general dental practice committee, said: “The strength of the evidence means I must now write to you to urge you to reconsider the current dental contract. Our concerns go beyond the significant transitional difficulties experienced over the past year and we can now demonstrate that the new system is in need of fundamental reform.”

He called for three key changes: the abandonment of units of dental activity as the only way of measuring performance; more money to be paid directly to primary care trusts for dental services; and for dentists to be given the option to transfer their NHS contracts to new owners.

Dr Ellman called on the Government to look again at an alternative model, called personal dental services, which was piloted over a seven-year period.

Near the front of the queue in Titchfield Common was Chris Rills, 49, who said: “I have been without an NHS dentist for three years.”

Last year the Government introduced a new contract to attract dentists back to the NHS. It claims that the move is succeeding, but a BDA survey has found that 85 per cent of dentists thought that it had not improved access to NHS care.

— An NHS dentist took her own life after succumbing to the pressures of work, an inquest in Pickering was told. Ingrid Gill, 46, of Thornton Dale, North Yorkshire, took an overdose of antidepressants and whisky after taking on a huge list as the only NHS dentist at the practice, and then being asked by one of the owners to resign from the NHS list because of ill health. She also later had breast cancer diagnosed. Verdict: suicide.

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