Can employees get urgent dental care within 48 hours?

Only one in five is very confident. In our YouGov survey of 1,020 UK HR decision makers, 20% said they were very confident their employees could get urgent dental care within 48 hours through their current provision ^[1]. At the other end, 17% were not at all confident.

Everyone else sits somewhere in between, which in practice often means they don't know. That is a fair answer. Most HR teams have never had a reason to test it, and the honest response depends on where staff live, which practices near them take new patients and what any existing cover pays for.

NHS capacity hasn't kept up with demand. The British Dental Association estimates that 13 million adults in England, 28% of adults, had an unmet need for NHS dentistry in 2024, and around 780,000 were on NHS dental waiting lists ^[2].

People who aren't registered with a practice feel this most. An employee with sudden pain and no regular dentist has to ring round, contact NHS 111 or pay for a private emergency appointment if they can find one. Each of those takes time, and it is usually time on a working day.

They wait, and the problem gets harder to treat. In a 2023 Bupa survey of 2,049 UK employees, 73% said they had delayed going to the dentist, and more than two in five had delayed treatment because they were worried about needing time off work ^[3]. In the same research, 48% said they had called in sick or left work early because of dental pain.

Some go further. A 2023 YouGov poll found that one in ten Britons say they have attempted their own dental work ^[4]. For the employer, the cost arrives as short-notice absence, people working through pain and shifts that need covering at the last minute.

Walk through a real case. Pick a typical employee, perhaps a warehouse operative on early shifts or a sales manager who spends half the week on the road, and work out what they would do at 7am with a swollen jaw.

1. Do they have a registered dentist, and would that practice see them the same day or the next?
2. If they contacted NHS 111, how far might they need to travel for an urgent slot?
3. Does any benefit you offer give them someone to speak to that morning?
4. If they paid privately, would a cash plan or other cover refund part of the cost, and do they know how to claim?
5. How would their manager record the absence?

If you can't answer the first three with confidence, you are where most of the HR leaders we surveyed are. The fifth matters because 29% of businesses record unplanned absence as general sickness without noting the cause ^[1], so dental cases rarely appear in the data you would use to size the problem.

Start with what you already have. Many employees don't know whether a cash plan, private medical cover or employee assistance programme gives them any dental support, so a short, plain note on how to use it can close part of the gap at no extra cost.

Then look at time. Letting staff attend urgent appointments without using annual leave removes one of the reasons people put treatment off. Some employers also add an on-demand dental benefit such as Toothfairy, which gives employees access to UK-registered dentists through an app and can sit alongside a cash plan or other cover.

Whatever you choose, run it through the 48-hour test above. The goal is simple: an employee in pain should know exactly who to contact that morning.

NHS guidance is to contact a dentist or NHS 111 for emergency, urgent or out-of-hours dental care, by phone or online ^[5]. The NHS page lists the situations that count as urgent, such as a knocked-out tooth or severe pain that is affecting sleep.

Put that link somewhere staff will find it at 7am, on your intranet or benefits portal, next to the details of any dental support you provide.