More than 200 children waiting over a year for community dentist

More than 200 children have been waiting for over a year for their first appointment with Jersey’s community dental service, new Health figures have revealed.

A further 274 youngsters have been waiting between six months and a year, as the Health Department acknowledged that capacity has “long been an issue” for the service.

The community dental service provides free treatment for children across the Island up to the age of 11.

Papers due to be presented to the Health Advisory Board – a panel tasked with overseeing the service – today show that 203 children have been waiting more than 365 days from their first referral, although appointments have now been booked for 152 of them.

The lengthy waits have been blamed on staffing shortages and an influx of patients following the end of an initiative which brought in outside providers to tackle a backlog during the pandemic.

“Capacity for community dental has long been an issue,” the report said.

Parents have been complaining of long waiting lists for many years, with Express reporting in 2017 that some parents were having to pay thousands in private dental care for their children due to “excessive” waiting times of up to five years.

At the time, a survey by dental health promotion charity Super Smiles found that half of children aged five had never visited the dentist, while around 3,000 children had never been registered with one.

External providers were contracted after the pandemic to reduce waiting times, which Health said proved successful.

However, the latest report explains that when the contract ended, patients were referred back into the hospital service, causing “a further influx of patients”.

At the same time, recruitment to a long-standing vacancy and another permanent dentist going on maternity leave “resulted in significantly reduced capacity within the dental service”.

Since June, money from the vacant post has been used to fund extra clinics run by permanent and temporary staff, allowing more children to receive their first dental check-up.

The additional clinics are expected to continue until the permanent vacancy is filled.

Health said that when fully staffed, the community dental service comprises three permanent dentists and one dental therapist – which it calculates would provide enough capacity to meet demand.

The dental backlog forms part of wider pressure on outpatient services.

Across Health, 2,333 patients are waiting more than a year for a first outpatient appointment, with the board papers revealing that the position has “deteriorated substantially” since September 2025.

The department said workforce shortages, recruitment difficulties, insufficient clinical capacity and problems with how some patient pathways are managed were the main causes of prolonged waits, rather than unusually high numbers of referrals.

Health’s recovery plan aims to reduce the number of community dental patients waiting more than a year from 203 to zero by the end of 2026.