Abstract
The GDS fees crisis of the 1990s has been a watershed in dental health policy. Prior to this the attention was on those with high disease experience and low demand and the talk was of how such people could be encouraged to seek dental care. Now the talk is of providing care ‘for those who want it’ since the NHS now struggles to meet demand. Unfortunately, the supply/demand imbalance is not a consequence of a successful health promotion policy but a loss of supply. This may seem irrelevant to the subject under discussion but before describing details of the new strategy it is worth remembering that we have in fact moved a considerable distance from the kind of thinking which pertained in the 1980s. This was an era in which a study into marketing dentistry to adults with low demand was commissioned1 following concerns raised by the Standing Dental Advisory Committee; one cannot conceive of any policy interest in looking at why adults don‗t demand dentistry these days. The current government can quite reasonably claim to have inherited a problem not of their own making and the NHS dental plan2 is the first formal announcement of their plans to deal with this and other dental issues after a considerable period of coat tailing.