to be honest, im not sure what 111 is for myself, absolutely useless, no wonder people have been dying. its supposed to be instead of calling an ambulance, its for like a non emergency phone number.
I'm not a dentist, so this is just based on my own experiences of using out of hours dental services, plus what I have been told by various dentists and dental nurses (of which one used to work part time for NHS Direct, which was the predecessor to 111)...
If you need to see a dentist either during the evening after your usual dental practice is closed or during weekends or bank holidays, then if you phone your dental practice, there should be a message on the voicemail telling you what to do if you need an emergency appointment.
If it's a private practice, then sometimes this means that your own dentist will arrange to open the surgery and see you or sometimes they might have arrangements with other local private practices to see patients out of hours. But if it's an NHS practice, things are a bit different.
Depending on the area where you live, NHS out of hours services (both GPs and dentists) are sometimes provided by a private company who usually have emergency GP and dental clinics, where if you phone their call centre, they will arrange for you to be seen if necessary. Other areas use the NHS 111 phone service to field calls and schedule appointments and then if they decide you need to be seen, you are sent to a local dental clinic which is run by the local NHS primary care trust.
I had my first root canal about three and a half years ago when I used to go to an NHS practice. It was done in November and never really settled down. Over the Christmas holidays that year, I ended up in severe pain from the same tooth and so because my usual dental practice was closed for Christmas, the message on the voicemail said to phone NHS Direct (which has now become 111...). When I phoned NHS Direct, I spoke to a call handler first who then said that a dental nurse would call me back within the hour. About an hour later, I received a phone call from a dental nurse who went through all my symptoms and gave advice on painkillers etc. I explained that my normal dentists wasn't open for another few days and she said that I needed to be seen sooner than that (this was on Christmas day), so she would arrange for one of the call centre people to phone back first thing in the morning with an appointment at a local NHS clinic. The following day (Boxing day), I got a phone call at about 8am, to say that I had an appointment at 9.30am at a clinic about 10 miles away which was run by the local NHS primary care trust (the same people who provide community dental services for people with special needs and complex medical problems etc).
When I went to this emergency appointment, the dentist just poked down the side of the tooth with her finger, told me it was infected (it wasn't) and said that I could either have the tooth extracted there and then or she could give me some antibiotics and I would then need to go and see my own dentist after Christmas to have the root canal re-treated. I didn't want to lose the tooth, so I chose the antibiotics.
Nowadays, I go to a private practice and over the past few months, I've been having a lot of root canal treatment so I've also been going to a specialist dental practice. A few weeks ago, I was talking to one of the dental nurses who works at this other practice and she said that she used to work part time for the NHS Direct telephone line, screening patients and arranging appointments. NHS Direct used to be absolutely swamped (and presumably 111 is now) with patients either genuinely needing emergency appointments or phoning up as an emergency in order to get seen by an NHS dentist because they didn't have their own dentist and had discovered that they could get an appointment that way. Because of this (and because it's only meant to be a basic emergency/urgent service to provide immediate treatment until you can see your own dentist), they have to have fairly strict criteria which determines whether you are given an appointment at an out of hours dental clinic or whether they give you advice on what to do for yourself over the phone. Also, most NHS out of hours dental clinics, unlike out of hours GPs, are not actually open 24 hours; they're usually only open during the day and often into late evening, so appointments have to be limited to those who are deemed to be emergencies.
The dental nurse I spoke to said the list of symptoms for being given an emergency appointment included; severe pain (which can't be controlled by over the counter painkillers or ice packs), swelling, bleeding, active spreading infection and a few other things I can't remember. She said that you had to have a certain number of symptoms from this list in order to meet the criteria for an appointment, otherwise if you didn't, then they gave you advice on what to do until you could get an appointment with your own dentist.
I don't know whether 111 operates in exactly the same way, but it could be that perhaps your symptoms (although horrible for you) were not deemed urgent or serious enough to need an emergency appointment because you could wait until you could see your own dentist. Whatever the reason, they should have been able to at least give you some decent advice over the phone on what to do.
