Policies

Dear valued existing patients and prospective patients,

Please do review our practice policies below, provided for your reference! If you should have any queries please do not hesitate to contact us, we would be delighted to help.

Failed to attend and late cancellation appointment policy

Every year we lose valuable surgery time because of patients failing to attend their appointments, or cancelling at short notice. This means it may be difficult for us to accommodate our patients in need of urgent treatment, book routine appointments for our existing patients, and for new patients to register here. It also costs the surgery £250.00 per hour in lost time. This also makes it difficult for us to maintain our prices as affordable as possible.

A patient who fails to attend their appointment or cancels with less than 48 hours’ notice, will be liable for the late cancellation fee of £60 weekdays and £70 weekends. In the event that a further appointment is missed a further late cancellation or missed appointment fee will be applied.

Discretion will be used if there is a good reason for the appointment being missed.

As with all medical clinics, we aim to see our patients on time, however due to the nature of health care, this is not always possible. If a patient turns up late for their appointment, and the dentist is unable to carry out treatment, this could be regarded as failing to attend depending on the amount of time available for the treatment, at the discretion of the dentist.

Failed to attend charges

To cover the surgery running costs of a failed appointment, there will be a charge of £60 for a week day appointment and £70 for a weekend appointment. This is non-refundable and separate to treatment fees.

Late cancellation charges – 48 hours notice

If you need to cancel an appointment, please give us at least 48 hours’ notice (this excludes weekend days and bank holidays). Charges will be made if we receive this notice with less than 48 hours notice. These charges are the same as failed to attend charges.

Text reminder and email reminder automated systems are used as a curtesy to remind you of your appointment 48 hours and 24 hours before.

Text and email reminders are available for all appointments. All text messages sent by our system are logged when successfully sent. It is your responsibility to check your text and email messages and to ensure that we are informed of any changes to your mobile phone number or email address. We will assume that you have received your reminder if it has been logged as successfully sent.

Please note, text messages and emails are sent out of courtesy, not necessity. It is your responsibility to turn up on time up on time for an appointment. Failure of the text messaging system for any reason is not sufficient reason for failing to attend or turning up too late for treatment.

Data Protection Policy

The Cherrytree Dental Care complies with the 1998 Data Protection Act. Our procedures for ensuring that our patients’ personal information is stored and processed lawfully and fairly are described in this policy.

What personal data do we hold?

To ensure that we provide the highest standard of care and patient service, we need to hold some personal information about you. This personal data comprises:

•Your past and present medical and dental condition;
•Personal details such as your date of birth, your physical and e-mail address, your telephone number and your NHS number;
•Radiographs, clinical photographs and study models;
•Detailed information about the dental treatment we have provided or have proposed to provide, and its cost;
•Notes of conversations between yourself and any member of our staff;
•Records of consent to treatment;
•Any correspondence relating to you with other healthcare professionals, i.e. hospital or community services.

Why do we need to hold this information?

Comprehensive and accurate information is one of the tools we use to provide you with the highest quality of dental care and to ensure that our communication runs smoothly and all proposed treatments are appropriate and safe to use in any individual case.

How do we process the data?

We will process your personal data in the following ways:

1.Retaining information

We will retain your personal information whilst you are a practice patient and for at least 11 years after you cease to be our patient, or, for children, until the age of 25 – whichever is the longer.

2. Security of information

Any personal information that we hold for our patient is safely stored on the practice computer system and/or in our manual filing system. The information is not accessible to the public and only authorised members of staff have access to it. Our computer system is password protected, has secure audit trails and we do back-ups regularly. Our processes are audited regularly to ensure compliance with this policy.

3. Disclosure of information

In order to provide proper and safe dental care, we may need to disclose some of your personal information to the following:
•Your general medical practitioner
•The hospital or community services
•Other health professionals caring for you
•Inland Revenue
•Private dental schemes of which you are a member.

Disclosure will take place on a ‘need to know’ basis so that only those individuals/organisations who need to obtain information from us in order to provide care to you and for the proper administration of Government will be given the information. The only information that will be disclosed is the information requested by the individual/organisation. In very limited circumstances, or when required by law or a court order, personal data may have to be disclosed to a third party that is not a healthcare provider. In all other occasions, your personal information could be disclosed only when you have provided us with a specific consent.

4. Access to information

You have the right of access to the data we hold about you and to receive a copy. We need you to provide us with a written request in order to be granted access. Access to computer records and manual records (including radiographs) may incur a charge of £50.00. We may ask you for proof of identity before we comply with your request. We will provide you with a copy of the record and, if so required, with an explanation of the record, within 40 days of the request and payment of the applicable fee.

If you do not wish to have your personal information disclosed or used in any way described in this policy, please discuss this with the Practice manager or Mrs Svetlana Kulyk. You have the right to object to the disclosure of information but this may affect our ability to provide the highest quality of dental care.

Cookie policy

Most other websites will ask you to enable ‘cookies’ when using them. The cookies are a useful tool that allows the website to ‘remember’ certain information about you, either for the duration of the visit (‘session cookie’) or permanently (‘persistent cookie’).
The information that the ‘cookies’ remember for you is never personal and cannot damage your device. They only store your preferences and help you navigate between pages and improving your experience.
Cookies may be set by the website you are visiting (‘first party cookies’) or they may be set by other websites who run content on the page you are viewing (‘third party cookies’).
By accepting cookies or using any part of the site beyond the home page, you consent to the use of cookies. We will use a cookie to remember your preference. Please be aware that disabling cookies may prevent you from using all the features in our websites – such as booking appointment online.

Our communication with you

The communication with our patients is of paramount importance to us. Protecting and safeguarding it enables us to effectively use all information gathered from you and apply it in order to carry out the best treatment for you.
All our employees have a contractual obligation not to disclose any sensitive information about the practise or its patients, details of which can be found in our Data Protection Policy.
Additionally, all communication with our patients via e-mail is strictly protected. All completed queries are safely stored in the patient’s file, which is password protected and are subsequently deleted from our e-mail inbox folder.
Pending queries are forwarded to a Patients’ queries folder, which is again password protected to ensure their safety. Once completed, they are deleted from our e-mail inbox folder.

Thank you for reviewing our policies. If you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact us:

T. 02086179180

E. reception@cherrytreedentistry.co.uk

The Cherrytree Dental Care team 🙂