Children in Hawke’s Bay are being told to wait two years for a routine check-up at the free community dental service, and some who were due to be seen in 2023 are still waiting. RNZ reported on Friday that Health New Zealand’s dental hubs in the region are still working through children whose recall dates fall in 2023, while the New Zealand Dental Association’s latest national scorecard puts Hawke’s Bay last in the country for timely child dental care.
Zeyin Li, who moved to Hawke’s Bay recently, told RNZ what happened when he tried to enrol his two children for their regular check-ups. “I phoned the community dental number to try and enrol them, that’s when they told me there is a two year wait. They said they are only seeing kids who were due two years ago,” he said. Li was able to pay for a private appointment instead, but he is worried about families who cannot. “A two year wait is a long time and I’d be worried about problems with dental decay happening in my kids,” he said.
Basic dental care is free in New Zealand for everyone under 18, and the Community Oral Health Service is meant to be the front door for children from birth to Year 8. Health New Zealand’s own service specification expects every child to get at least one examination a year, with higher-risk children seen every six months, and it sets a benchmark that no more than 10 per cent of enrolled children should be overdue at any time.
The New Zealand Dental Association’s 2026 Oral Health Report Card, released in August, shows how far the country is from that target. At the end of 2024, 33.6 per cent of children nationally were overdue for their scheduled care. Only three districts, Whanganui, Wellington/Hutt and Wairarapa, met the 10 per cent benchmark. Everywhere else was over it, from 10.4 per cent in Southern to 52.4 per cent in Hawke’s Bay. In half of the 20 districts, 35 per cent or more of children were overdue. The association says those rates point to “significant service capacity constraints” and to real risks for children’s oral health and for equity.
Health New Zealand’s group director of operations in Hawke’s Bay, David Warrington, told RNZ there was no single waiting time that applied to every child in the region. “However, we acknowledge there are delays for some routine appointments, and our dental hubs are currently working through children whose scheduled recall dates date back to 2023,” he said. “Our mobile dental service is operating an 18-month circuit covering all schools up to Year 8 with an equity index of 1-4, with the aim of improving equitable access to care,” he said. The mobile circuit is targeted at schools with higher levels of need.
Warrington said shortages of dentists and oral health therapists were a national problem that had also hit Hawke’s Bay. “Improving access to oral health services in Hawke’s Bay is a priority. We are reviewing how services are delivered across the region to make the best use of our dental hubs and mobile clinics, while also increasing workforce capacity. We have recently recruited two additional therapists who are expected to start early next year,” he said.
The pressure is not confined to Hawke’s Bay. Dr Rudi Johnson, clinical director and principal dental officer for the community dental service in Bay of Plenty, told RNZ the current wait in her region was about 19 months, against recall intervals that are meant to range from six to 18 months depending on a child’s risk. “It’s tricky, but we’ve noticed that the longer kids wait for an assessment or treatment, then their needs are worse, or their needs are a lot higher. They’ve got more tooth decay that we’re trying to treat,” Johnson said.
Johnson, who is a member of the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists, said the East Coast was worse again, with the vacancy rate for dentists in the Tairāwhiti health district, which covers Gisborne and the East Coast, around 90 per cent and some schools along the coast likely to have gone well over two years without a visit. “We’ve got lots of issues out there, we’ve got staff vacancies everywhere and we’ve got minimal funding to run these foundation child services… it’s not easy,” she said. She said the community service was in the worst state she had seen. “I’m not going to make excuses for Covid because it has been a number of years since then, but we just haven’t been able to catch up,” she said. “We carry on and we do our best but dental is always one of those forgotten services,” Johnson said. She also pointed to an ageing workforce in community oral health that is heading towards retirement.
The Hawke’s Bay figures have been a sore point locally since the scorecard came out. In August, Tihei Tākitimu, the iwi-led health partnership board for Hawke’s Bay, called for an emergency taskforce to clear the backlog. The board said it had delivered 22 recommendations to Health New Zealand in February after a review late last year, and that the main visible response so far had been short-term pop-up clinics. “The system is simply not moving fast enough,” its co-chairs Kerri Nuku and Lewis Ratapu said at the time.
The wider workforce picture in the scorecard helps explain why the backlog is so hard to shift. The Dental Council counted an average of 53 full-time equivalent dentists and dental specialists per 100,000 people in 2024, which sits inside the typical OECD range but below Australia on 61, Canada on about 65 and Ireland on 73. The national average also hides the regional spread. In 85 per cent of former district health board areas there were 45 or fewer dentist full-time equivalents per 100,000 adults, and in 2022 six council areas, including Kaipara, Westland and the Chatham Islands, had no practising dentist at all. The scorecard also records that the share of parents reporting their under-15s had seen a dental worker in the previous year fell from 84.4 per cent to 75.1 per cent over the decade to 2024/25.
There is some movement on the supply side, although it will take years to show up in school clinics. On Wednesday, Tertiary Education Minister Penny Simmonds announced that funded places for domestic dental students at the University of Otago, the country’s only dental school, will rise from 60 to 72 a year from 2027. Two of the 12 new places are reserved for students from rural backgrounds, lifting that minimum from 10 to 12. The Dental Association welcomed the decision as the first increase in funded places in more than a decade, after it had asked for the cap to go to 90. “We’ve asked for this for a long time and we’re glad to see it happen,” its president Dr Dave Excell said. The association’s director of dental policy, Dr Robin Whyman, said rural towns feel shortages first and students from rural areas are more likely to go home to work. “The first of these dentists won’t be working until 2030 and many of today’s dentists are getting close to retirement,” he said.
That timing matters for a child in Hawke’s Bay who was due a check-up in 2023. Dentists trained under the new intake will not graduate before 2030, and the community service that sees children is staffed largely by oral health therapists rather than dentists, so the extra Otago places do not directly fill the roles that are vacant in school clinics now. Health New Zealand’s two new therapists for the region start early next year. Until then the region’s children keep waiting, and the longer they wait, the more work each of them will need when they are finally seen.
Have your children been waiting for a community dental appointment, in Hawke’s Bay or anywhere else in New Zealand? Tell us how long the wait has been and what you have done in the meantime in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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