The effectiveness of out-of-hours dental services: I. pain relief and oral health outcome

The effectiveness of out-of-hours dental services: II. patient satisfaction

“…2 The important finding is that walk-in services (here, those services specifically intended for unregistered patients) are -paradoxically -perceived to be much harder to access than services initially contacted by telephone. While some of this difference may be due to these services being poorly publicised (combined with unregistered patients being less well informed about all types of dental service), it may also reflect dissatisfaction with having to visit a dental clinic for all problems, even just for advice.…”

“…A full description of the survey method and the characteristics of the services and attending patients has been presented in the first paper. 2 The results presented here are based on responses to an adapted patient satisfaction instrument, which was originally developed for out-of-hours medical care patients. Follow-up questionnaires were sent to 859 consenting patients, and they were mostly (90%) completed within four weeks of their episode of emergency care, median 15 days after.…”

“…2 However, both poor response rates and low base numbers mean that dental hospital service data must be treated with some caution. In contrast with previous analyses using the same questionnaire (and larger samples), 15,16 our subscale scores have not adjusted for the age, sex, registration status or other patient characteristics.…”

“…1 The first paper in this series has shown that patient-reported health outcomes were not related to service type, suggesting that neither the treatment setting nor the type of dentist seen has a significant impact on the chances of getting symptom relief. 2 Although symptom relief is accepted as one of the main aims of out-of-hours or emergency dental care, there are various reasons for trying to understand and measure satisfaction with the overall experience of seeking and receiving care.…”

A retrospective investigation of the clinical management of patients attending an out of hours dental clinic in Merseyside under the new NHS dental contract

“…7 Previous studies looking at the provision of urgent dental care have failed to investigate the clinically presenting conditions of patients attending such clinics, the recorded diagnosis and the appropriateness of the treatment provided, particularly in relation to the prescribing of antibiotics. 4,[8][9][10][11][12][13] From these previous studies it was impossible to ascertain whether the antibiotics prescribed to patients attending the OOH clinics was appropriate or not. Casual communications from dentists and patients who have accessed the OOH service suggest that there is an increasing reliance on prescribing antibiotics to manage urgent treatment, rather than provide defi nitive best practice clinical treatment.…”