If you need to be seen urgently, please telephone the surgery for advice – 01225 424336. If treatment is essential, we will do our best to see you within 24 hours. For emergencies when the surgery is closed, call the surgery and the answerphone will provide you with advice.
NHS patients please contact NHS direct on: 0458 120 6680.
If you are unable to keep an appointment, please let us know as soon as possible. We may make a charge for missing appointments. If you are an NHS patient and have missed more than one appointment, we may not be able to complete your treatment or offer NHS treatment in the future.
Complaints
We hope you will find our services agreeable but we welcome any comments as to how we can improve. If you have a complaint, please speak to your dentist or our practice manager. We offer a complaints procedure which can be explained to you if necessary.
Practice Complaints Procedure
If you have a complaint or concern about the service you have received from the dentists or any staff working at this practice, please let us know. We operate a practice complaints procedure as part of an NHS system for dealing with complaints. Our complaints system adheres to national criteria.
How to complain
We hope that most problems can be sorted out easily and quickly, often at the time they arise and with the person concerned. If your problem cannot be sorted out in this way and you wish to make a complaint, we would like you to let us know AS SOON AS POSSIBLE - ideally, within a matter of days or at most a few weeks – because this will enable us to establish what happened more easily.
If it is not possible to do that, please let us have details of your complaint:
Within 6 months of the incident that caused the problem or
Within 6 months of discovering that you have a problem, provided this is within 12 months of the incident.
Complaints should be addressed to the Practice Manager, or you may ask for an appointment with the Practice Manager in order to discuss your concerns. Our Practice Manager will explain the complaints procedure to you and will ensure that your concerns are dealt with promptly. It will be a great help if you are as specific as possible about your complaint.
What We Shall Do
We will acknowledge your complaint within 2 workings days and aim to have investigated your complaint within 10 working days of the date when you raised it with us. We shall then be in a position to offer you an explanation, or meetings with those involved. In investigating your complaint we shall aim to:
- Find out what happened and what went wrong.
- Make it possible for you to discuss the problem with those concerned if you would like this.
- Make sure you receive an apology where this is appropriate.
- Identify what we can do to make sure the problem doesn’t happen again.
Complaining on behalf of someone else
Please note that we adhere strictly to the rules of confidentiality. If you are complaining on behalf of someone else, we have to know that you have permission to do so. A note signed by the person concerned will be needed unless they are incapable (because of physical or mental illness) of providing this.
Complaining to the BANES Primary Care Trust
If you have a problem, we hope you will use our practice complaints procedure. We believe this will provide the best chance of putting right whatever has gone wrong and an opportunity to improve our services in our practice.
This does not affect your right to approach the BANES PCT if you feel you cannot raise your complaint with us.
If you are dissatisfied with the result of our investigation, you should contact the BANES Primary Care Trust Complaints Manager, Sue Griffin at:
BANES PCT Trust HG
St Martin’s Hospital
Midford Road
Bath
BA2 5RP
T: 01225 831830
E: info@banes-pct.nhs.uk
