Playbook, dental clinic
Routing a dental complaint without touching the clinical part
Complaints at a practice split cleanly, and the split decides the handling. A complaint about the desk, a bill or a wait is administrative. A complaint that a crown does not fit or that an extraction was never explained is about clinical care, it goes to a clinician, and software must not put a sentence anywhere near it.
Why this is not the general answer
The handling pattern for complaints holds across every trade. What follows is the part that does not.
- Practices are expected to operate a written complaints procedure with named stages and timescales, and it is a document a patient can ask for, which makes quoting it both safe and expected.
- A complaint about treatment is a clinical matter, and any sentence characterising what happened in somebody's mouth is a comment on care that the practice may later have to account for.
- There is usually an external route once the practice stage is finished, and which body it is often depends on whether the treatment was funded or private, so the material has to keep the two routes apart.
- The person complaining is frequently still a patient, often still mid course of treatment, which makes the tone a question about a continuing clinical relationship rather than about customer service.
How it arrives
- i want to complain about my treatment
- my crown does not fit and no one is listening
- who do i complain to about a dentist
- can i have a copy of your complaints procedure
- i was not told what the treatment would cost
- the dentist was rude to my son
What has to be indexed for this to work
| The written complaints procedure, with stages and timescales | Who receives a complaint, how quickly it is acknowledged, how long an investigation takes, and who signs the response. Publish the version you would hand to a patient who asked for it at the desk. |
|---|---|
| The external route, kept separate for funded and private care | Where a patient can take a complaint the practice has not resolved, and how that differs depending on how the treatment was paid for. Merging the two sends somebody to the wrong body and costs them weeks. |
| What you need in order to log one | Dates, which clinician, what happened, and what the patient would like to happen. The last is the most useful and the least often requested, and it is frequently smaller than anybody expected. |
| Who reviews a clinical complaint | The named role, usually a clinician, that looks at anything about treatment. Naming them is what makes the handover read as an escalation instead of a deflection. |
The reply
I am sorry this has happened, and I want it to reach the right person rather than stop with me. We have a written complaints procedure setting out who looks at it and how long each stage takes, and you can ask for a copy [1]. Anything about your treatment is reviewed by a clinician rather than by reception, so please leave me your name, an email, the dates and what happened, and it goes to the practice manager today.
It apologises for the experience and says nothing whatever about the care, which is the distinction that protects the practice without sounding cold. Naming the procedure as a document the patient can hold reads as a process rather than a wall. And it asks for the four facts that let somebody investigate without a second exchange.
Where it stops
The trigger. Every complaint, and immediately on any mention of a solicitor, a regulator, an indemnity provider or a review.
This needs a person at the practice rather than me. Leave your name, an email and what happened, and the practice manager will pick it up and tell you what happens next.
It stops answering before it guesses, says who will pick it up, and asks for the one thing that makes a reply possible. Nothing about it reads as a dead end.
Never say this here
Out of bounds
- Never comment on whether treatment was carried out well, was appropriate, or should have been done differently.
- Never say a refund, a remake or a waived fee will be offered, because that is a clinical and commercial judgement about one course of treatment.
- Never attribute the problem to a named dentist, a nurse or a laboratory.
- Never discourage a patient from using the external route, or imply it is unnecessary.
Questions
- Should it try to resolve small complaints?
- No. It should recognise them and route them, and nothing else. A cited quotation from the fee page in reply to a complaint about a crown is the most inflammatory thing it could produce, because it proves nobody read the message.
- Is publishing the external route risky?
- You are generally expected to tell patients about it anyway. A patient who can see there is a route above the practice usually gives the practice stage a fair run first.
- What if the complaint is really about the bill?
- Then it is administrative and the same procedure applies. What matters is whether any sentence in the reply describes the treatment, and for a billing complaint none needs to.
Keep reading
- Everything for a dental clinicThe questions a dental practice actually gets, the ones that must reach a clinician, and the documents worth indexing first.
- Handling complaints in generalThe job is to route, not to resolve. Acknowledge without conceding, name the escalation route, and get it to a person fast.
- Plan, insurance or paying at the desk: three different answersA capitation plan is not insurance, and neither decides what a claim pays. What to publish about plans, claim forms and authorisation.
- Somebody wants a price in writing before they have been seenA dental estimate is a document issued after an examination, not a figure from a chat window. How to explain the way one is produced.
- Three access requests a dental practice gets, none of them an FAQA wheelchair user, a deaf patient needing an interpreter and a patient asking about sedation are three different requests.
Try it on your own material
Upload a document or point it at your site, paste one line of HTML, then ask it something only your business could answer.