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On behalf of the Irish Dental Association, I wish to advise you of the profound concern of dentists contracted under the Dental Treatment Services Scheme to treat medical card holders.
Patients are experiencing unprecedented difficulties and delays in seeking to have applications for medical cards processed or to have existing entitlements confirmed for renewal. This is causing huge uncertainty for patients who in many instances are choosing to defer attendance with their dentist because of the uncertainty associated with the huge backlog in dealing with their applications.
This chaos is also of great concern for dentists who wish to offer the highest standard of dental care to patients who currently have the greatest need for such care and treatment.
The HSE has made no effort to communicate changes associated with the centralisation of medical cards to this Association or to individual dentists. No explanation of the separate local and national databases was offered to dentists nor was guidance offered on ways to deal with situations where these databases are not reconciled.
To compound matters, dentists have reported that they are finding it impossible to make telephone contact with PCRS staff members when they make calls on behalf of their patients. We regret to say this is entirely consistent with the experience dentists have encountered for many years in regard to the administration of the medical card scheme for dental patients.
It should also be stated that dentists are being left in an invidious situation where they are being denied payment for services offered in good faith where both the dentist and the patient understand the patient to be entitled to such treatment but where the HSE then disputes this entitlement and denies payment to the dentist and effectively terminates before completion the free dental treatment available to the patient as a medical card holder.
We should also warn that we believe the existing scheme of free dental care for medical card holders is set to be terminated as a result of the decision in the most recent Budget to restrict spending on this scheme to 2008 levels. We believe this will effectively amount to a 30% cut in funding required to meet the needs of medical card holders and we would hope to address the Committee on this matter separately and at your earliest convenience.
Fintan Hourihan
Chief Executive
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