So what's new at St. Paul's Dental Practice:
Reflecting on 2011
As this year comes to a close, we look back on what we have achieved at St Paul’s Dental Practice in 2011.
At the beginning of the year we reorganised the way we reprocess dental instruments, to achieve best practice according to the Department of Health. We relocated the office and reorganised the basement, building a dedicated decontamination area. As well as achieving compliance above and beyond current legislation, we saw this as an opportunity to improve our patients’ experience, creating a quieter, more relaxed atmosphere in the surgery and freeing up our nurses to be more involved in patient care.
In March we received a certificate of recognition for attaining the Investors in People Standard, demonstrating an on-going commitment to continually develop our team of highly skilled, knowledgeable, professional people.
The team grew. We managed to recruit the services of an additional dentist two days a week, to make sure our three surgeries are fully utilised every day. This helps us meet the needs of more than 7,000 patients as promptly and efficiently as possible as well as allowing Nick some valuable time to develop our Dental Implant Service.
(Dental Implants are a successful long term solution to replace missing teeth, not routinely provided on the NHS. For more information, view the specific areas of this website).
This year Nick has undertaken more than 60 hours of professional development and education specific to dental implants, through the Association of Dental Implantology and the International Team for Implantology.
With more services available here we also recruited additional support staff and several members of staff have achieved additional qualifications this year, making for an exceptionally competent team.
We successfully registered with the government’s new Care Quality Commission qualifying as a suitable organisation for the provision of dentistry!
We have investigated many novel ways of getting information out to our patients and receiving feedback on the service we provide, a ‘news’ page here; the waiting room and surgery display screen; a comments book; targeting specific topics on the notice board, such as oral health and mouth cancer awareness; culminating in the patient satisfaction survey completed in September.
We have tried to look at what isn’t working well here and make necessary changes.
- Initiating text reminders for appointments should help to cut down on wasted time from non-attenders.
- Computer malfunctions and down time has meant we are about to embark on a system rebuild.
- Auditing the practice environment has led us to review our cleaning protocols and implement some redecoration.
Over the festive period we will be providing the following service:
- There will be normal opening times up until Christmas and many spaces will be reserved on a daily basis to deal with any urgent dental problems.
- December 16th, the practice will close midmorning for our staff Christmas lunch, any enquiries after this time will be directed to our emergency service.
- Between Christmas and New Year we shall be providing an emergency only service (28th;29th;30th)
- Out of hours and bank holidays will be covered as usual by Devon Dental Services.
If you need to get in touch, phone the practice and you will be directed accordingly.
