Scotland Gets Nothing … or Does It?
By Graham Findlay, Scottish Committee
After 6 long years dealing with the Scottish Executive through the Chief Dental Officer Ray Watkins, Scottish Lab owners were quite clearly told during the Dundee Conference in November 2005, that the £2,000 training bursary (already operating successfully in England) would indeed be available for Scottish Labs that wanted to put a trainee through the Scottish Dental Technical Training Course at either Telford or Langside Colleges and it would be paid retrospectively for those students who had just started college a couple of months prior to the Conference.
SO! 12 months on and guess what? - still no bursary available and, as usual, no-one is prepared to shoulder the blame for this completely unacceptable delay in its implementation.
The DLA has now been in negotiations with the Scottish Executive for six years and despite numerous “promises” not one penny has been allocated towards training of dental technicians - but, of course, millions have been allocated to dental surgeons and student dental surgeons willing to commit themselves to working in the NHS in Scotland.
My question to the Scottish Executive is: ‘when the tens of millions of pounds handed out to surgeons in Scotland finally kicks in and produces al these extra dentists to work all over Scotland - and NHS treatment becomes widely available - who is going to do the technical work????’
Scotland, according to current figures, requires 32-35 newly qualified technicians annually to replace those leaving the profession. In Scotland the two colleges teaching dental technology (soon to be one) have fallen well short of these figures for some time now, and therefore it does not take a mathematician to calculate that the workforce will very shortly be 40% under strength at a time when Scotland’s dental laboratory industry is crying out for help with course fees, travelling expenses and other associated costs of employing a trainee.
And, sending them to college: what do the powers that be decide - we should have a VT Scheme for newly qualified dental technicians - extremely commendable, as I am sure it will prove completely invaluable for these newly qualified dental technicians. It is certainly something that the DLA has been pursuing for some time now, to increase the work based part of their training but I just feel they are putting the “cart before the horse” because if there is no help to put trainees to college, who is going to be available for VT.
The VT Scheme was announced by Joe Mcintyre, Scotland’s new Director of Training for Dental Technicians and the pilot for the scheme is due to start in February 2007 with 10 students, to be followed by the scheme proper in August 2007.
I wish the Director well with his project but hope he may put aside some time to consider the lack of bursary availability.
