Whanganui hosts Dental for All panel on free dental care campaign

Dental for All heads to Whanganui to campaign for publicly-funded dental care. Photo / 123rf

A roadshow advocating publicly funded universal dental care is heading to Whanganui.

The Dental for All coalition was started in early 2022 by Action Station’s Max Harris, and is now made up of dentists, unionists and anti-poverty campaigners.

In 2023, a poll released by the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists (ASMS), a member of the Dental for All coalition, showed 74% of people strongly agreed or agreed that adult dental care should be funded in the same way it is funded for children.

The year before, ASMS released the Tooth be Told report, which found that 42% of all adults in New Zealand have an unmet need for dental care because of cost.

“Nearly half of New Zealand adults have unmet dental needs because of cost, that’s in the most recent New Zealand Health survey, but those stats have been the same for a really long time,” Dental for All campaigner Hana Pilkinton-Ching said.

“That’s a really high proportion of the population who aren’t able to access a really basic type of healthcare.”

The Dental for All campaign also asks the Government to uphold Te Tiriti o Waitangi obligations.

“The way it is currently, for adults, dental care is almost entirely delivered in the private sector and so, because it’s separated from the rest of our health system, the Treaty obligations that the Government has across other areas of the health system are not really upheld,” Pilkinton-Ching said.

The estimated economic benefits of providing oral healthcare for 380,000 low-income adults, as published by the New Zealand Dental Association (NZDA), is $1.60 to the Government for every dollar spent.

“There’s not really any reason for oral health to be treated different from the rest of our health except that it’s just the way the system already is,” Pilkinton-Ching said.

Dental for All’s roadshow event in Whanganui will be a panel including chief executive of Ngā Waihua o Paerangi Trust Helen Leahy, co-ordinator at Auckland Action Against Poverty Agnes Magele, Dental for All campaigner Max Harris and Whanganui dentist Hadleigh Reid.

Reid said, if not universal dental care, more subsidies would be beneficial.

“I think some basic dental care could at least be subsidised. Maybe even just the basics like annual checkups and cleans, which would encourage initial dental visits, at least, and keep people connected with dental services,” he said.

“Most dental problems are preventable, but you can also say that for most medical problems and the Government pays for most of that, so I do think the Government should help more and should not differentiate between general health and dental health.”

The Dental for All roadshow will be in Whanganui on Thursday, August 14 from 5.30pm to 7.30pm at the Whanganui Regional Museum flexispace.

RSVP at our.actionstation.org.nz/events. Food will be provided.

Olivia Reid is a multimedia journalist based in Whanganui.