Denplan

Most people believe that tooth decay, gum disease and tooth loss are an inevitable part of growing older, but if you know how to take care of your teeth and gums, you should be able to look forward to a healthy mouth throughout your life.

At Buckden Dental Clinic, we recommend that you follow a programme of preventive care, using the skills of the practice team and the support of Denplan Care.

What is Denplan Care?

For a fixed monthly sum, Denplan Care helps you budget for regular, affordable, preventive dental care, without the fear of costly and unexpected bills, including any treatment normally carried out by a general dental practice.

What do I get for my money?

In return for your regular monthly payment, you are entitled to regular examinations and consultations, ongoing advice, a personal preventive care programme and all the routine dental treatment such as fillings, extractions, root canal treatments, normally received from a general dental practice, needed to help you maintain a healthy smile.

You also receive access to a 24-hour emergency helpline and accident cover up to £10,000 per incident, emergency treatment up to £710 per year, and £60 per overnight stay in a hospital if under the care of a maxillofacial surgeon.

How to join Denplan Care?

To join Denplan Care, we will carry out a dental assessment that will also cover aspects of your oral health. Guided by this initial assessment, we will then establish your monthly Denplan Care payment. This payment will be collected monthly by direct debit by Denplan and paid to your dentist.

There is also a one-off registration charge of £15.00, which is collected with your first monthly payment. You then enter into a straightforward continuing care contract with your dentist.

What is Denplan Excel?

We are committed to an all-round programme of preventive dental care, and we are delighted to be one of the few practices to achieve Denplan Excel accreditation this year. In simple terms, Excel is a quality standard. It has been developed in conjunction with the British Dental Association and the Royal College of Surgeons.

Achieving this standard involved an initial training programme with a practice assessment, followed by a very rigorous practice inspection. A central feature of Excel is the oral health score, expressed as a simple percentage.

The scores are weighted heavily, so that 75% would be a very low score. At Buckden Dental, we aim to get all our patients into the high 90s – this is where most regular patients score. The score is recorded at each examination and given to patients in a folder, together with any relevant information cards. Your score is stored on your computerised file and updated at each check-up. The idea is to better inform our patients about their oral health.

Excel also incorporates a confidential patient questionnaire. The report compiled from this survey gives us very useful feedback on how we are doing. Questionnaires are sent to a random 50% of our Denplan patients for detailed feedback on our performance.

The objective of Excel is ‘to place you, the patient, at the centre of all activities’. It also includes Supplementary insurance and Denplan’s Insurance Services.