Top NHS dentists paid five times the Prime Minister’s salary

Five NHS dentists are paid nearly £700,000 a year.

Dentists are top earners (Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)

The pay of the top five NHS dentists has been revealed to be nearly five times the Prime Minister's £142,000 pay packet.

The NHS Business Services Authority has disclosed that the pensionable pay of the top five NHS dentists averaged out at £690,000 a year (£3.4 million between them).

This is nearly five time the Prime Minister’s salary of £142,000.

Katherine Murphy, of the Patients Association, suggested that the rates of pay were obscene.

“Investment is urgently needed on the front line where there is a desperate shortage of nurses [and] patients waiting for hours in A&E … when the NHS is under such huge financial pressure, this type of spending on huge salaries is unacceptable,” she said.

It takes around seven years to qualify as a dentist (PHILIPPE HUGUEN/AFP/Getty Images)

In addition to the top five, 11 more dentists’ salaries fell in the £400,000 and £500,000 bracket, and over 150 earned more than £200,000, according to The Daily Mail.

It has been suggested that these high salaries could be a product of practitioner contracts introduced back in 2006, which give dentists a fixed sum for a set amount of work agreed at the start of the year, as opposed to charging for the amount of work done or patients seen.

A high earning dentist can run more than one practice, in which case they would would of course be able to reap the benefits of each contract.