ADG gives community dentistry a dedicated advocate in Helen Paisley
The Association of Dental Groups has named Helen Paisley as its new Ambassador for Community Dentistry, placing one of the sector’s most experienced leaders in a role designed to keep community-based oral care visible in policy discussions and professional planning. The appointment comes as demand for community dental services continues to hinge on access, workforce stability, and the ability to meet the needs of patients who often require more time, more coordination, and more specialised clinical settings than routine practice can provide.
Paisley arrives with a career built inside the very part of dentistry the role is intended to represent. She previously served as a board director at the ADG and is chief executive of Community Dental Services, a Community Interest Company delivering care across much of the East of England, the East Midlands, and North Yorkshire. Her remit has included special care, paediatric dentistry, and prison dentistry, areas where the clinical workload is shaped by complexity rather than volume alone.
Community dentistry is often the place where the system’s most difficult cases land.
Her appointment is likely to matter because the sector depends on relationships that reach beyond the dental chair. Engagement with Integrated Care Boards sits at the center of the new role, with a focus on oral health priorities and on ensuring that primary dental care and community services are part of local planning rather than treated as a separate afterthought. In practice, that means a stronger voice for services that care for people with disabilities, medical frailty, behavioural or sensory difficulties, and other additional needs that make standard dental pathways hard to use.
Neil Carmichael, executive chair of the ADG, framed the appointment as part of a broader effort to strengthen advocacy for both clinicians and patients. He pointed to the importance of community dentistry within the association’s remit and said the new role would help the sector understand the challenges and opportunities specific to care delivered outside mainstream high-street settings. He also linked the appointment to the ADG’s 15th anniversary and its plans for the next phase of growth, making clear that community dentistry is now part of that strategic direction rather than an ancillary concern.
Paisley’s background gives the role immediate credibility. She qualified as a dentist in 1984 and has spent much of her career in community dental services, including the treatment of patients with complex needs under sedation and general anaesthetic. Those settings carry a different clinical rhythm from routine dentistry. Appointments may need to be longer, theatre access may be limited, and decisions often involve coordination across medical, social care, and safeguarding networks. For patients with additional needs, the availability of a clinician who understands those pressures can determine whether care is delayed, deferred, or completed safely.
The appointment also places workforce issues into sharper focus. Community dentistry relies on highly skilled dental professionals who work with patients that can be harder to assess, harder to position, and harder to treat in conventional settings. Recruitment and retention in that environment depend not only on pay and staffing, but on professional recognition and on a system that understands the demands of the work. A dedicated ambassador can translate those realities into language that commissioners and policymakers are more likely to act on.
Helen Paisley has built her career around that argument. In her own remarks, she described the appointment as a way to ensure that patients who need community dental services, and the workforce that provides them, are heard clearly by policymakers, politicians, and the wider dental sector. Her emphasis on advocacy reflects the reality that access problems in dentistry are not evenly distributed. Patients with additional needs can be pushed furthest to the margins when services are fragmented, and community provision is often the safety net that prevents those gaps from widening.
A single appointment will not resolve those pressures. It can, however, shape how they are discussed.
The ADG’s decision also signals that the association sees community dentistry as part of the future structure of oral healthcare rather than a niche service at the edge of the system. That matters because community services sit at the intersection of equity, clinical complexity, and public accountability. They treat children who cannot easily be managed in routine practice, adults with special care requirements, and people in secure settings who may have had little consistent access to dental care. Each of those groups carries distinct needs, but they share one feature: their treatment depends on services that can adapt to the patient, not the other way around.
By naming Paisley to the role, the ADG has tied its public voice to someone with direct operational experience in the sector. The move gives community dentistry a clearer advocate at a time when oral health planning increasingly depends on cooperation between providers, local systems, and national decision-makers. It also places the needs of patients with complex oral health requirements into a more visible policy frame, where access, capacity, and service design can be debated alongside more conventional dental priorities.
For a field that often works outside the spotlight, that visibility is the point.