Our goal is to provide high quality health care to all of our patients in a timely manner. No-shows, late arrivals and cancellations inconvenience not only our dentists, but our patients as well.
 
NEW PATIENTS
 
It is our practice policy that a deposit be paid in order to book any new patient appointment. This is a private fee and must be paid even if you are intending to register as an NHS patient, as until you have signed a GP17 dental registration form, been seen and assessed by the dentist and they have accepted you onto their NHS list, you still remain unregistered.
 
UNREGISTERED PATIENTS WHO WANT TO REGISTER PRIVATELY must pay the £52 new private patient examination fee before an appointment can be made.
 
UNREGISTERED PATIENTS WHO WANT TO SEE DENTAL THERAPIST ONLY FOR AIRFLOW must pay the £65 airflow fee before an appointment can be made.
 
UNREGISTERED ADULT PATIENTS WHO WANT TO REGISTER ON THE NHS pay a £30 booking fee and a £15 booking fee is required for all unregistered patients 16 years old and under.
 
If you are normally exempt from paying NHS charges then this booking fee will be refunded once you have attended for your new patient examination and you have signed a GP17 form. If you do not have a dental exemption and normally have to pay NHS charges, then this booking fee will either be refunded once you have attended for your new patient examination and signed a GP17 form or will be deducted from the cost of your treatment plan.
 
All of the above booking fees are non-refundable if you late cancel or miss your appointment (please see below for details).
 
LATE CANCELLATIONS & MISSED APPOINTMENTS
 
We understand that sometimes cancellations cannot be helped due to illness or emergency and discretion may be used if there is a good reason for the appointment being missed.  When you make an appointment, you are holding a space in our diary that is no longer available to our other patients. In order to be respectful to your fellow patients, we kindly ask that you contact the practice as soon as you know you will not be able to make your appointment. Our appointments are in extremely high demand, and your advanced notice will allow another patient access to that appointment time.
 
A cancellation is considered ‘late’ when the appointment is cancelled less than 24 hours before your appointment time. A no-show is when a patient misses an appointment without cancelling. If this late cancelled or missed appointment was your first at the practice, you will lose your booking fee (see above) and be required to pay a new booking fee before you can make another appointment.

PRIVATE TREATMENT APPOINTMENTS
 
You will also be asked to pay a fee prior to booking in for any private dental treatment. This will normally be around 50% of the treatment fee that will be due at the appointment. If you fail or late cancel this appointment you will lose this fee.
 
NHS TREATMENT APPOINTMENTS
 
If you fail or late cancel an NHS treatment appointment you will be charged a missed appointment fee which is £1 per minute of wasted appointment time (e.g. £30 for a 30-minute appointment). For treatment being carried out over numerous appointments that require a device to be made by a laboratory (e.g. dentures or crown/bridgework) then a % of the treatment cost will be required prior to the fitting of the device.
 
If you late cancel/miss two consecutive appointments or late cancel/miss more than two appointments within a one-year period then you risk deregistration from the practice.
 
It was a difficult decision to have to implement this policy however we hope by doing so we will reduce the frequency of wasted appointment time and be able to see more patients much sooner.