Mystery shopping dentistry

Report - 1 August 2017

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.

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Dentist Mystery Shop - Access to emergency care & registration options during Covid-19

30 November 2020

We conducted a mystery shopping exercise in November 2020, contacting all dental practices in Newham, to understand whether patients could secure an NHS emergency appointment and whether practices are registering new NHS patients.

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What is Enter & View?

8 August 2020

The visits are carried out by trained Healthwatch volunteers. The volunteers will speak to service users, staff, relatives and carers, and will observe how the service is delivered, and the general environment in which it takes place.