Re-opening For Routine Care

To our valued patients,

Firstly I hope you and your loved ones remain safe and well.

We are pleased to inform you that we will be returning to routine dental care as of Monday the 20^th of July including provision of dental health examinations and hygiene appointments. We look forward to welcoming all of you back to the practice over the coming months!

All of the staff here at Eccleshill Dental are looking forward to seeing you all, and hopefully the start of things returning to normal. While many things have changed, our commitment to you and delivering exemplary patient care has remained steadfast.

Thank you all for your patience, support and loyalty throughout this period. Since our reopening on 8^th of June, our team have worked really hard to see any patients who have reached out for our help and support during this pandemic. We have seen many of you already with urgent and essential issues, and now we can begin to return to routine care. We will ensure that every patient is seen and will ensure that nobody will be missed out.

As we have said before we wish to reassure you all that we will honour any ongoing treatment plans and membership plan appointments and benefits.

If you have an appointment scheduled after the 20^th of July please assume that this is going ahead as normal and attend the practice at your appointment time. We will contact you if we need to amend this appointment but if you do not hear from us, please attend your appointment as normal.

For appointments that have been postponed because of Covid-19, we are working hard to reschedule all your appointments. Our reception teams have kept detailed logs of all postponed appointments and we will contact each patient affected to rearrange your care. We would appreciate if you do not contact us to rebook your appointment (unless you have received from us notification asking you to do so). This may actually slow our ability to work through our logs, plan for reopening and schedule your care.

We will be in touch via phone, text and/or email to each effected patient to arrange appointments, and we will ensure every patient is seen as soon as possible. As we resume routine care, we ask that you to bear with us and understand that we are doing our best to accommodate your scheduling needs. We know many of you are anxious to get back into to see us.

To help us schedule your care we are providing extra clinics and have increased our opening hours. However, the new safety and cleaning protocols mean we cannot accommodate as many patients in our practice as we normally would. In addition, we will still be scheduling appointments in a manner that promotes social distancing and allows for adequate time for us to disinfect all areas of use in between patient appointments. Again, we thank you for your patience and understanding throughout this time.

Safety and infection control has always been of the highest priority in our practice and we have meticulously considered the published scientific data and always aim to provide a safe environment for our patients and staff based on guidance from the NHS, Public Health England and the Government.

As a result of these increased protocols, your next visit to the practice may look and feel different. Our team members will be wearing enhanced PPE, we will be promoting social distancing and your journey through the practice may be different. We have created some information and practice videos to highlight of some these changes and will update you with these and more information in due course. We hope that these changes will be transient and over the coming weeks and months, we will return to normal. However, at present we must ensure the highest level of patient safety.

When attending the practice please wear a face covering and attend at your exact appointment time – the front door will be locked, however a member of the team will be expecting you and will be asked to sanitise your hands immediately upon entry. If you do not wear a face covering, we can provide you with a face mask for a small charge. To ensure social distancing, if the waiting areas are full we may ask you to wait outside or in your car.  We still need to ask that patients enter the practice unaccompanied, if possible. For those patients who need a guardian to accompany them, we ask that this be limited to a single family member.

Our waiting room and communal areas have been decluttered so please excuse our appearance. In addition we no longer offer magazines and leaflets as these items are difficult to clean and disinfect. 

Alongside our email updates, we would be grateful if you could monitor our website, FaceBook and Instagram pages for regular updates and information.

We have noted that some patients have either not provided us with an email address, or have not given us appropriate consent to contact them via email (as per GDPR regulations). As a result, regrettably we have not been able to correspond with these patients personally. If you have not received our regular practice emails and would like to do so, could you please email the practice on info@eccleshilldental.com. In this email, please could you include your name, date of birth and your preferred email address. If your family members also attend our practice, please advise us of their details and preferred email address as well, so we can also update them.

Finally and again, thank you again for your trust, loyalty and patience throughout this pandemic. Please know that we are all really looking forward to seeing you soon. We have missed you!

If you have any questions, please get in touch.

Best wishes
Karan
Mr Karan Rishi BDS MJDF RCS (Eng) PG Cert (Clin Ed)