Health | How a routine employee survey uncovered a chronic dental access issue (and what Operose Health did about it)

A free-text question in an internal staff survey revealed what a formal benefits review might have missed: employees at the UK's largest primary care provider couldn't get dental care. Here's how that finding led to a company-wide partnership with Toothfairy.

When Operose Health invited its 1,800+ employees to share open, free-text feedback on how the organisation could better support their wellbeing, dental care wasn't an area anyone expected to dominate the responses. But as the answers came in, one issue surfaced again and again, unprompted and in employees' own words: getting to a dentist had become nearly impossible.

The scale of the response stood out. The need for accessible dental care was volunteered repeatedly, across roles and locations, by staff describing cancelled appointments, months-long waiting lists and pain they were simply having to live with. For an organisation that itself delivers NHS primary care to more than 700,000 patients, hearing that its own 1,800-strong workforce couldn't get basic dental treatment was a signal too strong and consistent to overlook.

Recent NHS data details the extent of the shortage; 97% of people trying to register as a new NHS dental patient in England were unsuccessful. An estimated 14 million working adults in the UK are living with unmet dental needs, 23 million working days are missed every year in the UK due to preventable dental issues. For many, the constraint is no longer cost, it's whether an appointment exists at all. Problems that a routine check-up would once have caught early are instead left to worsen, turning into avoidable pain, more complex treatment and time away from work.