The Department of Health is to launch a new pilot scheme aimed at improving services for dental patients in the UK.
Under the scheme, more than 30 dental practices across the UK will trial over 30 recommendations made in the Independent Review of NHS Dental Services to help improve oral health, increase access to NHS dentistry and ensure high quality dental care for patients.
The recommendations were published last June in the final report by Professor Jimmy Steele, who led the NHS dentistry review.
They include methods of improving access to NHS dentists, introducing patient registration, measuring quality of treatment, and encouraging dentists to carry out more preventative work.
Over the next two years, the participating dental practices will trial different ways of delivering these dental service improvement recommendations, although the NHS will be able to implement the changes sooner if they feel it is necessary.
Health Minister Ann Keen said: "We know that access to NHS dentists is improving - more people visited a dentist in the last two years than at any period in the last decade."
"As well as continuing to build on this success and drive access even higher, we need to look at the quality as well of quantity of treatment being carried out by the NHS ."
