Fife dental care: 2000 calls a month to advice line as Fifers struggle to get treatment
Access to NHS dentists in Fife is still an ongoing challenge - but “slight improvements” have been seen in the last year.
Members of Fife’s Health and Social Care Integration Joint Board (IJB) received an update on the picture at its meeting last week.
It heard that access issues due to ongoing dental workforce recruitment and retention challenges remained the largest risk.
The report from Emma O’Keefe, dental public health consultant, outlined the challenges facing services.
“Realistically the risk will continue as high until there is a significant increase in new NHS dental registrations as a result of dental practices opening or dentists taking on more NHS patients,” she said.
“The opening of three practices since July 2025, the most recent one in the Kingdom Centre, Glenrothes, on January 5, 2026, is encouraging but this is set against a backdrop of over 34,000 Fife residents being de-registered in 2024 and over 7,600 in 2025.
“Fife has three areas included in the Scottish Dental Access Initiative (SDAI) grant scheme. One successful application has been approved and opened in July 2025 and has already registered over 3000 NHS patients, and the books are open for further NHS registrations.
“Primary care has received two further applications and are working through the required processes and has also received an additional expression of interest. “
Despite the progress, she said “ongoing challenges” with accessing dental care in independent dental practice means patients are still struggling to get seen. This has resulted in Fife’s Dental Advice Line currently receiving around 2,000 calls every month.
Lisa Cooper, head of service, primary and preventative care, said: “We continue to look for areas where we can improve access for participation in dental care. We work with academic institutions and have students coming to Fife and we hope they like working in Fife and will remain in Fife.
“We do what we can to make Fife a good place to come to live and work.”
Councillor Rosemary Liewald (Lochgelly, Cardenden, Benarty, SNP) welcomed the progress.
“We are seeing improvements we need to get better but we know the work is going on there particularly when it comes to children’s oral health,” she said. “Let’s just continue doing what we are doing out there and we know this is not solely in regard to Fife. We know it is not just across Scotland, we know it is UK wide that our dental services are struggling.”