Yes. The General Dental Council's Scope of Practice, in force across the UK since 1 November 2025, lists prescribing, taking and interpreting radiographs among the tasks dental hygienists and dental therapists generally undertake after registration.
Under IR(ME)R 2017, which covers Great Britain, only an IR(ME)R practitioner can justify a dental radiograph: a registered health care professional, such as a GDC registrant, whom the employer's written procedures entitle to do it.
The College of General Dentistry's Selection Criteria for Dental Radiography sets UK bitewing intervals by caries risk. Adults at high risk have posterior bitewings every six months, at moderate risk every year, and at low risk approximately every two years.
A bitewing shows periodontal bone loss, but it tends to show less of it than is really there [5]. Against bone measured at surgery, radiographic bone level underestimated loss in every one of 17 comparisons in a meta-analysis of infrabony defects, by a mean of 1.10 mm [1].
Yes. The law requires a recorded clinical evaluation of every dental exposure, except an exposure of a carer or comforter. In Great Britain the duty is regulation 12(9) of IR(ME)R 2017; Northern Ireland's regulations, as made in 2018, use the same words.
Digital radiographs and film detect caries with broadly similar accuracy [17]. A 2021 Cochrane review of early, enamel-only caries put pooled sensitivity at 0.44 (95% CI 0.38 to 0.50) for film and 0.49 (95% CI 0.42 to 0.56) for digital, and specificity at 0.90 (95% CI 0.86 to 0.93) and 0.