Publication, Part of NHS Dental Statistics

NHS Dental Statistics for England 2020-21, Biannual Report

Official statistics

Publication Date:: 25 Feb 2021
Geographic Coverage:: England
Geographical Granularity:: Clinical Commissioning Groups, Country, Dental practices, Local Authorities, Regions
Date Range:: 01 Apr 2020 to 31 Dec 2020

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Annex 3 - Data dictionary

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 within this report 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 the NHS Dental Statistics 2021-2022 biannual publication in February 2022.

We apologise for any inconvenience this has caused.

8 November 2021 16:00 PM

Band 2 activity undercounting: December 2019 - March 2022

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.

8 March 2023 00:00 AM

Summary

This biannual report contains dental activity for England covering April to September 2020 and patients seen data for 24 month period (adults) and 12 month period (children) up to 31 December 2020.

This publication includes information about patients seen and NHS dental activity broken down to dental practice level.

To limit COVID-19 transmissions, dental practices were instructed to close and cease all routine dental care from the 25th March 2020. The data reported in the publication including activity and patient numbers will be lower than expected during the time period of restrictions. Further information can be found in our 2019/20 Annual publication supplementary report and the Annex 5 data quality statement - see links below.

Adults seen by an NHS dentist

19.7m adults were seen by an NHS Dentist in the 24-months up to 31 December 2020 which equates to 44.5% of the adult population

Children seen by an NHS dentist

3.6m children were seen by an NHS dentist in the 12 months up to 31 December 2020 which equates to 29.8% of the child population

Courses of treatment delivered

2.8m courses of treatment were delivered in quarter 2 of 2020-21. A decrease of 7.04m compared to the same quarter in 2019-20, based on provisional data

Interactive data visualisation

You can access the interactive data report here