Manx Care is looking for more bank dentists to improve its community dental services in the island.

Staff bank positions are jobs that are filled from an agency and are not permanent contracts but filled as and when shifts need more staff.

The island’s health care provider said the reason for advertising for these zero-hour contract jobs is to ‘enable us to have more resilience’.

Manx Care is looking to hire experienced, fully-qualified dentists as relief for the community dental service and to provide ‘high quality, patient centred NHS dental service to priority groups as decided by Manx Care’.

This includes providing dental cover during holidays and sickness and providing home call-out care for those who cannot attend their appointments, and providing cover for the prison dental service as and when required.

The salary for the bank dentist will be between £67,542 to £78,999 pro rata per year.

The Manx Independent asked Manx Care how many it needed to hire. However, it did not respond before the paper went to press.

The closing date for the bank dentist job applications is January 20.

In a recent Social Affairs Policy Committee meeting regarding the oral health of children in the island, evidence was heard to assess the progress of measures to improve children’s oral health in the Isle of Man.

The 2021-2026 Oral Health Strategy for Children aged 0-11 years was laid before Tynwald two years ago, however, Manx Care boss Teresa Cope says that there ‘should be a reset/review of the strategy’.

An updated implementation plan for the 2021-2026 Oral Health Strategy for Children aged 0-11 years is to be laid before Tynwald by the end of July 2023.

A 2019 survey of child dental cases, which was included in the report, found that 7% of parents/guardians did not take their child to a dentist every 12 months because of the waiting lists and how difficult it was to get an appointment.

One reply read: ‘The dentist cancelled our appointment and rescheduled appointment was a three- month wait.’

The committee recommended that Manx Care ‘should address the limited availability of access to NHS dentists, particularly for children’.

In October, there were 2,086 patients waiting on allocation to a dentist, 784 of which are children.

In August we reported that 1,763 people were on the waiting list for a dentist in the island.

A CQC report into dental practices in the island found all 12 NHS clinics in the island to be ‘caring’.

This is an example of a much wider problem as 20% of all Manx health service jobs are open, as the Manx Independent revealed in October.

This means that the Manx health service suffers twice as much understaffing than the NHS in the UK (10% of jobs are vacant).

On the government’s job site, there are currently 40 positions available in Manx Care, from consultant dermatologist to advice and liaison volunteers. Most of the jobs advertised are staff bank positions.

When Manx Care took over the day-to-day running of the healthcare system in the island, it found that there were 92 nurses vacancies in Noble’s Hospital alone.