http://www.sheffieldtelegraph.co.uk/news2/Emergency-dentist-link.3926056.jp

Emergency dentist link

By Kate Lahive

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A NEW phone number to help people in need of urgent dental care is being launched in Sheffield on Monday.

Residents who are not already registered with a dentist and experience serious problems with their teeth need to ring the Urgent Dental Service's new phone number on 0844 736 8440.

The contract with the previous provider came to an end. Health company Primecare will now manage the service.

John Green, Sheffield's director of Dental Public Health said: "The new contractors offer a rapid emergency service that can deal efficiently with urgent dental health care needs."
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Heinz wrote on Mar 29^th, 2008 at 7:39pm:

It is the quesion of what is "This" that is the point at issue.

This number is a call type g11. The BT charge rate for these is the same as what will be that for chargeable daytime geographic calls from next Tuesday (i.e. 4p per minute). It is not therefore easy to say that there is a revenue share involved.

Those who use call type g6 0844 numbers are unquestionably obtaining money from patients through a revenue share. Enough have admitted this for it to be without question. Revenue sharing is clearly unacceptable for NHS services "free at the point of need" and must be prohibitted as a means of income, no matter how the income is used.

In the case of call type g11, landline callers on inclusive daytime packages pay extra, as do all evening and weekend callers and those from mobiles, whereas perhaps none of this money is received by the service provider. Without revenue share income, the contractor is simply being foolish, i.e. disadvantaging many patients to no good purpose.


Another interesting example was found in the media recently - http://www.buxtonadvertiser.co.uk/whaleybridge/Whaley-gets-new-dentists.3919682.....

The number here - 0844 655 0222 - is call type g8, charged by BT at 1p per minute. In this case, some callers pay less than for a geographic call, so the service provider would undoubtedly pay to receive all calls. Other callers would however pay more.


Initially I (we?) hope that Alan Johnson will simply confirm that revenue sharing by NHS providers is a breach of contract and that this must be enforced. It is however not easy to outlaw rank stupidity, where the provider pays to receive calls that cost some callers more and others less, than the cost of a geographic call. In time, all public service providers who can justify the extra cost of renting a non-geographic number must use 03xx, with perhaps a 080x option for some callers.