Sir, - Much as I enjoy reading your paper on a Saturday morning, I do not appreciate having my weekend disrupted by having to respond to a biased, critical and ill-informed attack on my professional standards by Mr Donal Atkins of the Irish Dental Association.
As the immediate past president of the General Dentist Practitioners' Association, a representative body for dentists both in the National Health Service and in private practice, I can see where some of the comments may be based, but there are many reasons for the high cost of dental treatment in the Republic of Ireland. One of these is that the market price for dentistry has been set by certain practices and simply followed by others.
While it is true that many of us in the North continue to work within the NHS, and that the NHS has control over our fees, and that those fees are by any standard very low, we as a profession have developed skills to compensate.
Our clinical standards are carefully monitored and deviance from those standards can produce very harsh penalties. Further, those dentists in the South whose time is spent mainly treating Dental Benefit or Medical Card patients should also be annoyed, because by inference, if they are not charging the high private fees, their quality of work must be poor - not the message that Mr Atkins would have wished to convey to his constituents.
The cost of private dental treatment in the North is set by a simple formula: time and cost to the dentist. Any ethical dentist, if asked to provide a treatment, will determine what standard and quality of result the patient expects and will provide the work to that standard.
What Mr Atkins also failed to mention is that purchasing today's dentistry is the equivalent of supermarket shopping. You buy what you can afford and pay more or less for top, middle or bottom of the range on offer. All will satisfy a need.
Finally, the dental laboratories in the North, in the South and in Britain will find it strange that Mr Atkins is comparing the quality of work provided on both sides of the Border to the detriment of the Northern dental profession, since those crowns, bridges and veneers are often manufactured in the very same laboratory.
My advice to Mr Atkins is to let his and other patients continue to shop around for the best value for money. - Yours, etc.,
Philip Colgan, BDS (QUB) MFGDP, Malone Road, Belfast 9.