Sussex dentists are being forced to go on holiday or take time off while thousands of patients cannot get treatment on the NHS.

Dental practitioners are being forced to turn patients away because they are not paid to do extra hours once they have completed work quotas allocated by the NHS.

It means that hundreds of people in Sussex who need dental treatment are not able to receive it or are being forced to wait far longer to see a dentist than is strictly necessary.

The news comes just days after The Argus revealed that hundreds of people from Sussex are now travelling abroad to place like Hungary to receive dental treatment because of a shortage of surgeries in Britain.

The British Dental Association has claimed dental practices in Sussex are among the main list of areas to be affected by the introduction of the NHS work quota system.

The reason is because the county, along with Merseyside and Birmingham, is one of the busiest areas in the country for dentistry.

Under the new NHS contracts, health trusts only pay surgeries for a set amount of work - measured in units of dental activity (UDA).

The idea was to encourage dentists to carry out more preventative work.

A spokesman for the British Dental Association said: "There are likely to be many dentists who have now reached the end of the financial year and who have got their feet up.

"That's because they're not being paid for any more work because they have reached the end of their allocated quota for the year.

"The system works on certain levels but it needs looking at in this respect."

The association fears that other dentists could suffer from a reversal of the problem and will be forced to pay back thousands of pounds to the NHS after having not met their quota targets.

One dentist in East Sussex, who did not want to be named, said: "We are being told almost constantly that there is a shortage of dentists.

"But the fact is surgeries like this one are able to take on extra capacity but were prohibited from doing so because of the quotas.

"It might not make a massive difference locally but if you took away quotas across the country the cumulative effect would be a much greater availability of dental treatments."

A spokesman for the Department of Health claimed the quota system was working well.

They said: "As with any system there has been some settling in time.

"But we are confident that it is a fair and workable solution which will ensure dentistry remains under NHS provision."