‘Who will staff them?’ Dentists slam Labor’s promise of free dental care

Victoria’s dental industry has slammed an election promise by Premier Ben Carroll to establish 10 free public dental clinics, dubbing it a political ploy to buy votes and warning it could blow out years-long waiting lists for the state’s most vulnerable patients.

The government announced on Saturday that it would create clinics with capacity to treat more than 100,000 people annually, at a cost of $230 million over three years under an Australian-first proposal, if Labor wins the November state election.

Carroll vowed anyone would be able to access dental care at the seven Melbourne and three regional walk-in clinics.

But the Australian Dental Association’s Victorian branch president, Dr Carolyn Ng, has criticised the proposal, warning it will only increase waiting times for the more than 2 million low-income or vulnerable people who are currently eligible for public dental care and already facing delays of up to three years.

“By opening up the funding, which is only $75 million per year, to everyone in the state, it means that ones who are already identified as being at most risk of dental disease are going to miss out,” the Melbourne dentist and specialist orthodontist said.

“It will only worsen the waitlists for them. The most vulnerable people will miss out on having their teeth saved.”

She also questioned how the government was going to staff the new clinics, saying publicly funded dental chairs were already operating at only about 50 per cent capacity around the state due to a workforce crisis plaguing the industry.

“Will he to be taking them from the public sector, where we already have huge shortages?”

Associate Professor Matt Hopcraft, a dental expert from the University of Melbourne, was also critical of the plan.

“The whole thing they are proposing just doesn’t make any sense to me,” Hopcraft said. “Fundamentally, it feels like an attempt to buy votes by tapping into a very real public desire for expanded dental funding.”

He said thousands of Victorians were increasingly losing teeth or ending up in hospital due to long public dental waiting lists, and $75 million a year and the proposed new clinics would not fix that.

“There’s absolutely a huge need for more emergency dental care, but at the state level, the problem that Victoria has is that they’re not staffing their existing clinics,” he said.

Under Labor’s plan, patients would be able to get free check-ups and treatment such as fillings, root canals and extractions.

Hopcraft said this proposal abandoned the established public health model of care, which focused on high-need patients, and instead opened access to everyone in a move that would make dental care harder to reach for those with the greatest need.