Advertorial: A Simple Route to NHS Conversion Success by Dr Paul Howlett

Why teaming up with Patient Plan Direct set the scene for success to transition away from general NHS dentistry

by Dr Paul Howlett

At Queensway Dental Clinic, we pride ourselves on providing the best possible care for our patients, making sure we make the most of modern equipment and materials.

When it came to providing private care as an alternative to NHS, we thought about what we wanted from a plan provider very carefully. We explored various options and decided that Patient Plan Direct gave us the best fit for what we wanted to achieve.

The core of our practice is ensuring that we get the fundamentals right for patients—making sure that they are properly assessed and diagnosed, and that they understand the importance of high-quality preventive care.

We believe that the plans we were able to offer via Patient Plan Direct enabled us to engage with our patients in the right way, meeting all our needs; we were confident that our core services were covered; and that we could offer patients added value as and when treatment was required.

It’s been a great partnership for us. We’ve had input and received good advice from the outset, long before we got to the stage of communicating the change to patients. We were also helped in communicating the reasons for the change to our team, so that they fully understood why we felt it was the right decision for the practice and patients.

We’re a big practice, with more than 100 members of staff, so getting the team on board has been crucial in our journey. Happily, Patient Plan Direct had the expertise to help us make the change as smoothly as possible. Our move to stop providing general NHS dentistry has been very positive for the practice, and patients have bought into why we made the change. We’ve no regrets; it’s a decision we thought about a lot over a long period of time and I’m sure we will continue to think it was the best decision we could have made, as we journey toward an even brighter future.

The benefit of working with Patient Plan Direct to introduce a private payment plan to transition from NHS to private practice is a low administration fee—from only £1 per patient per month, two to three times more cost-effective than working with other plan providers.

This ensures a practice is able to maximise the income a plan generates and/or keep the cost of its plan pricing lower for patients, which can result in increased uptake.

Visit patientplandirect.co.uk for more information.