Interview
MICK ARMSTRONG As Modern Dentist looks ahead to the challenges and opportunities for dentistry in 2018, Mick Armstrong, British Dental Association (BDA), told us about the work of the BDA in 2017, and how it plans to campaign for its members and for patients in the year ahead.
Q A
What have been some of the biggest challenges the dental industry has faced in 2017, and how has it responded to these?
Our responsibility is to ensure the voice of dentists is heard in the debate about general health, while fighting for our fair share of NHS resources. Brexit now seems to be taking a lot of the government’s time, and as a result our issues can seem even further down the agenda. We have been proactive. In the last twelve months we have had dentists raising these issues on the floor of the House of Commons and debating properly. We have had the media pick up several themes that we have raised about the emergency crisis in access. The message we’re repeating ‘til we’re blue in the face is that government has a responsibility to set an overall preventive strategy for dentistry. That’s the key to everything.
Q
Can you outline the core aims of the BDA’s 2017 manifesto? Where has there been success in achieving these aims, and where did you find challenges?
A 10|Modern Dentist Magazine
Our manifesto focused on prevention of oral disease, which really lacks a national programme. So we pushed hard and thought we were getting somewhere with a sugar levy, and a lot of our problems are closely related to those that