Dental care services must undergo significant changes to provide wider access from the health service, according to an independent review.
Ordered by the government, the review recommended that the way dentists are paid should be overhauled to encourage them to take on more NHS patients.
Greater focus on the quality of the service and the outcomes for patients needs to be provided, it said.
Dentists were urged to become "more explicitly accountable" in providing high quality, long-lasting treatments.
Health secretary Andy Burnham welcomed the review and said access to NHS dentistry had already improved, with new dental surgeries opening across the country.
"From the autumn, many of these will be asked to pilot the changes that the review has recommended," stated Burnham.
"I recognise that more needs to be done to bring NHS dentistry up to the standards that patients should expect, and we and the NHS are committed to ensuring that anyone can access high-quality digital services."
The report called on dentists to provide a clearer definition of the patients' rights upon registering with an NHS dentist.
And for a simpler registry process with dentists, information on local services will be made available through NHS Direct or the NHS Choices website.
The report was ordered after it emerged more than one million people did not have access to an NHS dentist.
Professor Jimmy Steele, author of the independent review, said dental contracts should be developed "with much clearer incentives for improving health, improving access and improving quality".
Dods Parliamentary Communications Ltd