It's been an NHS few days with news coming through that the campaign we have supported for a new NHS dentist in Snaith has moved a step forward. This has been a long campaign, with many people involved and much of the pressure for a new dentist coming from Snaith Town Council. Needless to say though the Labour MP has issued a quote which basically suggests it's all his doing. I wonder if there will be a photo of him to accompany this quote in the papers this week!

Local people are not fools, they remember who changed the system and took the dentists away in the first place. Labour's new NHS dentistry contracts saw communities up and down the country lose their dentists. The real heroes are the Town Council who kept up the pressure and of course the local NHS Trust who are after all the ones who found the cash for this.

If you would like to register for the new dentist which should be open in the Spring please call the dental team on 01482 315775 and leave details on the dedicated answering machine or email dental@erypct.nhs.uk.

I also spent a couple of hours yesterday meeting with the Chairman of the Yorkshire Ambulance Trust, Dr Nick Varey (see photo) at the HQ in Wakefield. I wanted to talk about a couple of local issues relating to Goole and so Nick very kindly arranged for a member of one of the crews to be present too.

I also got a tour of the call handling facility which, along with York, takes calls from the 6,000 square miles the Yorkshire Ambulance Trust is responsible for. The technology was amazing, I didn't realise that they can, and very often do, dispatch ambulances to someones address before the actual 999 call has been answered!