Mystery shopping dentistry
We received feedback about the difficulty of accessing NHS appointments and undertook mystery shopping in January and August to investigate this.
Summary
In December 2016-January 2017 our team carried out mystery shopping to investigate the availability of routine NHS dentist appointments. We repeated this exercise in August 2017 to see if there were more NHS appointments available.
Key findings
- 65% of practices could not offer a routine NHS appointment for children or adults within two weeks in Jan 2017.
- In Aug 2017 29% of practices were not accepting new NHS patients.
- 62% of practices could not offer a routine child’s appointment within two weeks.
- 54% of practices could not offer a routine adult’s appointment within two weeks.
This report was sent to the commissioners of the service, NHS England, for its comments. A new dental contract will be established in 2018-19.
We are concerned about the barrier this may create for patients in preventing problems or providing care in the right setting when conditions worsen.
