The North West London LDC held its Annual General Meeting on Wednesday 27 November at the Hilton in Wembley.
The Board presented a short run through of what we have been up to for the last year, a summary of our many meetings with the Integrated Care Board, helping to set up a dental liaison group with the ICB, membership of their Primary Care Programme Board, local engagement with Councils and more recently meeting with the Integrated Neighbourhood Team leads to discuss how dentistry can be integrated with local plans. We have published 14 articles this year on the website including a summary of the ICB’s attendance at one of our recent meetings.
In addition, the AGM was sad to see the retirement from the Board of founding member Noor Sacoor. Noor had been a longstanding member of the Ealing, Hammersmith and Hounslow LDC before the merger forming the North West London LDC of which she was a founding Director. Her experience will be sorely missed.
But, the AGM was happy to welcome two new Directors to the Board Shradha Patel, Director for Ealing and Siddharth Handa, Director for Hammersmith and Fulham. We look forward to working as a full Board and using the injection of new views and energy to drive the changes we need.
The AGM was joined by Sana Movahedi, the Regional Postgraduate Dental Dean (London & KSS) Workforce Training & Education (WT&E) Directorate, who spoke about the challenges and opportunities facing NHS dentistry. While stressing that WT&E would always support the profession with whatever training was required, and presented a comprehensive list of available courses, the underlying issues facing recruitment and retention of the workforce into the NHS was a challenge which would need the whole profession to come together. There was a good discussion over whether the move to ICBs was a good thing for dentistry or not, what it is that younger dentists need to be attracted to the NHS, and how the profession can effectively make the case for greater investment.
As 2024 draws to a close we look forward to building on our engagement and relationships in 2025 and finally getting agreement on introducing some changes to local services.
