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A dental practice which relocated to Fulwood last year has apologised after some patients have been left waiting nine months for a routine appointment.
Smile Dental Clinic closed its Deepdale practice in April last year.
But frustrated NHS patients say the new practice in Fulwood has not had appointments available for them as promised.
Read more: Opinion: The good and the bad of my hunt for a dentist
One patient, who asked not to be named, told Blog Preston: “You try and call the number and it doesn’t work or you’re left on hold. And the online system fails – it doesn’t recognise you. So you try to call, but then it never answers – so you’re stuck in a loop.
“We’ve been advised we can have an appointment at an alternative dental practice but their wait times are enormous too.”
The former Smile clinic has been renamed as Fulwood Dental Aesthetic and Implant Centre and is now located in a building attached to the Fatima Health Centre in Garstang Road.
Managers at the new dental clinic said the relocation to the Fulwood site had proved ‘extremely challenging and complex’ – as it brought together the Smile practice and the Dental Health Centre practices into one unit.
They said the move to one combined dental practice had been driven by the need to reduce costs to be able to continue to offer NHS dental services and not just accept private patients.
In a statement released to Blog Preston they said: “We are delighted to announce that Fulwood Dental in Preston is now fully open and ready to welcome patients. It has been a journey with its challenges, but we are incredibly excited to provide high-quality dental care to our community.
“In general NHS dentistry particularly since COVID19 has been suffering a lack of dentists prepared to offer NHS services mostly on account of low pay. NHS dentist pay has significant lagged behind real wages over the 20 years and this deficit has particularly accelerated since the cost of living crisis that we are all suffering from. Many dentists have voted with their feet and moved to the Private sector.
“In order to preserve, NHS services by reducing costs, we have built our new practice at Fulwood to accommodate the merger of Smiles and the Dental Health Centre practices.
“We are very grateful to the local NHS team to allow the relocation of both practices to the state of the art Fulwood Dental Care practice which benefits from full disable access, dedicated patient parking and modern dental equipment.
“We would like to sincerely apologise to any patients who were affected by the delayed opening primarily on account of an extremely challenging and complex building process at Fulwood.
“We understand the impact this may have had on some of our patients from Smile Clinic, and we deeply regret any inconvenience caused. We worked diligently to resolve the delays as quickly as possible and to ensure continuity of care for all patients during this time.
“To minimise disruption, patients impacted by the delay were offered appointments at our sister practice, Deepdale Dental Centre which is situated only 200 meters from the Smiles Clinic, where we ensured they could continue receiving the dental care they needed.
“While we experienced some initial teething issues, we are now fully operational.
“We are committed to providing exceptional care and maintaining the trust of our patients.”
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