NHS Dental Statistics for England, 2021-22, Biannual Report

The NHS Business Services Authority (BSA) identified an error in the reporting of the number of dental patients seen figures affecting the period December 2020 to June 2021. During the period affected by the Covid-19 pandemic many dental practices began triaging patients to determine the required care. Patients who were only triaged do not meet the criteria for a patient having been seen however they were incorrectly included within the counts of patients seen from December 2020 to June 2021 and as a result the counts published in the 2020-2021 biannual and annual reports are approximately 0.4% higher than they should be at a national level.

The NHS BSA have corrected this reporting error and NHS Digital have republished corrected data for December 2020 to June 2021 in this 2021-2022 biannual report.

Please note that more recent population data from the ONS (2020) is now available; when the original data was published in February and August 2021, 2019 ONS population data was used. The 2020 population data has been used in this publication to compare the number of patients who were seen by a dentist to the population. The population figures in this publication therefore differ from those published in 2021.

We apologise for any inconvenience this has caused.

From the 2022-23 reporting year onwards, this NHS Dental Statistics publication series will be comprised of a single annual release; the biannual report will no longer be produced.

The NHS Business Services Authority (BSA) have identified an error in the data provided which underpins the NHS Dental Statistics publication from December 2019 to March 2022. Some data for Adult patients in receipt of income-related Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) who received Band 2 dental treatment were not included and therefore the published counts are lower than they should be. 

The NHS BSA have quantified the impact of this missing data and have ascertained that the missing data accounts for <3% of all band 2 activity, and <1% of activity across all treatment bands.

Please note that no other treatment bands are affected, nor are data pertaining to patients seen, or clinical activity.

Due to the scale of this issue we will not be publishing corrected versions of this data. This issue will be rectified for data in the 2022/23 Annual publication.