Dental Clinical Assessment Service

In February 2021 we partnered with fellow social enterprise Community Dental Services (CDS) to assess how we could improve our patients’ access to emergency dental advice via NHS 111.

Another pilot initiative that centred around developing the clinical assessment service (CAS), this scheme saw us bring a dental nurse from CDS into our CAS at weekends with the intention of supporting patients with dental needs to access specialist support outside of their own dentist’s operating hours.

As ever, the intended impact of this was supporting patients to received better access to the right clinical support at the right time, subsequently reducing the likelihood of that patient defaulting to their local Emergency Department in search of treatment.

Following its initial rollout across our Mid and South Essex integrated urgent care (IUC) service, in the summer we further extended the pilot into our Norfolk and Waveney IUC service and continue to monitor its impact.

You can read more about the success of the service here.