Dental Choices is an independent website designed to help patients register with an NHS dentist and provide useful and reliable information on dental topics. Read more on the About Dental Choices page.
How do I show my practice has started/stopped accepting new patients?
Update your NHS website profile on the NHS website profile editor and Dental Choices will update automatically.
We know NHS practices are busy and the last thing they need are more administrative tasks. Dental Choices has therefore been designed to check each practice’s status on the NHS website daily so you do not need to contact us to make any changes.
To show your practice has started accepting new patients or has stopped accepting new patients you should simply update your NHS website profile on the NHS website profile editor (see the NHS guide to updating practice profiles on NHS.uk for help if required) and we will automatically detect the change and update your listing on Dental Choices within 48 hours. There is no need to contact us directly.
What should I do if have updated our practice’s NHS profile but Dental Choices is still incorrect?
In the first instance, please check Dental Choices again 48 hours after your updated your NHS profile. Dental Choices checks the NHS website for updates daily, but sometimes there can be delays.
If Dental Choices is still incorrect 48 hours after you updated your NHS profile, please contact us for more help.
Wrong address or phone number?
We collect practice contact details from the NHS website. In order to provide patients with a pinpoint location on a map, each address is looked up on Google Maps. Unfortunately there are many mistakes in the profiles listed on the NHS website and in situations where an exact match is not found on Google Maps, our algorithm makes a guess at the best match.
If we have listed your practice’s address incorrectly then please check and update your details on the NHS website profile editor(see the NHS guide to updating practice profiles on NHS.uk for help if required) and we will automatically detect the update within 48 hours. In particular double check the spelling of the road name and the post code, and avoid repeating town/area names in multiple address lines. Try using the format and spelling of your address used on Google Maps or Royal Mail’s Address and Postcode Finder.
Why is my home address or mobile number published on Dental Choices?
We collect NHS dental practice contact details from the publicly available NHS practice profiles on the NHS website. We do not use any other third parties to obtain dental practice information, and never purposefully collect home addresses or personal contact phone numbers.
If your home address or personal contact phone number is listed on the Dental Choices website this means whoever is responsible for maintaining your practice’s profile on the NHS website must have mistakingly input your personal contact details and published them publicly on the NHS website.
Please update your NHS website profile on the NHS website profile editor straight away(see the NHS guide to updating practice profiles on NHS.uk for help if required), and Dental Choices should detect the change and automatically update within 48 hours (usually within 24 hours).
Link to our search form
To help reduce time wasted fielding calls and emails form patients enquiring whether you are taking on new NHS patients, you may wish to provide unregistered patients with a link on your website or in an email template to our search form:
https://dentalchoices.org/find-nhs-dentist/
Articles
The main intention behind our articles is that dental professionals can send their patients links (via practice software, email or text message) to reliable information that backs up and reinforces what we say to our patients.
Additionally we hope that patients googling for dental advice will find useful and reliable advice that helps them to access dental care in an appropriate way.
We hope to include more articles over time. If you would like to contribute, correct or add to an article, then please leave a comment on the article (will be read but not published) or send your suggestion.
Link to our articles
You can send your patients a link to any article by visiting the article and copying the web address into an email or text message to your patient, or pressing the share button the in top right corner of the article.
Feedback, Issues and Suggestions
You can use our contact form to:
- Send us any positive feedback and/or constructive criticism
- Report issues and problems
- Make a suggestion for something we could do better
- Make a suggestion about something new you think we should do