Getting Urgent Dental Care in the North East & North Cumbria - Mystery Shopping Report
As part of this work, local Healthwatch across North East & North Cumbria undertook a mystery shopping exercise to get a real time understanding of what is being said to people and to understand their experiences of dentists across the region.
The mystery shopping exercise involved phoning dental practices, enquiring about a specific dental care scenario and reporting the results centrally for a regional overview.
Background
Getting Urgent Dental Care in the North East and North Cumbria - Mystery Shopping Exercise in February 2024.
This data provides a snapshot in time of a resident in the North East and North Cumbria (NENC) trying to get urgent dental care.
We ran two phases of data collection:
Phase one – NHS contract holding practices – we contacted 287 dental practices between 1 and 15 Feb from a list provided by the ICB.
Phase two – Private only practices – we contacted 117 private only dental practices on 26 Feb from a list we accessed from the CQC database.
Volunteers from the Healthwatch Network contacted all practices using a standard script that had been reviewed by a Dentist at the ICB. We captured what happened on each call through a survey completed as the call was taking place.
The scenario we asked about was someone who does not have a regular dentist, looking for urgent dental care, having had pain with a back tooth for 2 days that they are manging unsuccessfully with painkillers.
The full findings can be downloaded below.
