A Leitrim Councillor is calling on the Minister to urgently act to ensure dentists remain and re-join the dental treatment services scheme.
It provides funding to dentists to deliver services to medical card patients, however Brendan Barry claims the scheme is not up to standard with just one dental provider in Co. Leitrim.
Councillor Barry says this is forcing some patients to have to travel to Longford for a participating dentist.
At a meeting of Ballinamore MD this week he called on the HSE and Minister for Health to change to scheme conditions.
'' We're left with a situation now where there's only one dentist in County Leitrim who is partaking in the scheme. We have over 30,000 medical card patients in Sligo/Leitrim and there's only four dentists partaking in the scheme, so it's not physically possible for them four dentists. Changes have been made by the government and the minister earlier in the year because this has been ongoing for a number of years. But the decline is still happening and dentists are still exiting the scheme. So that isn't enough, and it needs to be urgently changed.''
