What do you do when you mix private and NHS patients in the same practice?

Practices often decide to supplement their income by introducing private patients into their practice alongside their NHS patients. This is a great way of dealing when a practice is overcapacity on it's contract or in a particularly popular area.

This can be fraught with some difficulties but most practices are able to work through them successfully. When considering mixing private with your NHS patients you must find out if your obligations and responsibilities to your patients. You may be required to offer a private patient treatment on the NHS if the NHS has it available or their particular treatment becomes available at a later stage. When thinking about mixing types of patients always contact your LDC.

Many practices find that they are advised that as long as they are fulfilling their contract to the provide the number of UDA's stated in their contract that they do not have accept new patients as NHS and can treat them privately. Other practices choose to treat private patients outside of the hours stated in their NHS contract so as not enter murky waters so this is also a consideration you must make.

If you do decide to begin mixing patients he great thing about Dentally is that it allows your practice to deal with both private and NHS patients as part of our dental software. You can complete claims for NHS patients and take payment from private patients, or even mix both on the same client. From time to time you may find that a patient would like a procedure or a course of treatment that is simply not available on the NHS. With our dental software it is perfectly fine to mix a course of private and NHS treatments. Our dental practice management system allows you to submit claims for the NHS for NHS treatments and charge for private treatments as part of the same course of treatment.

The practice management software allows you to easily see if a patient is a private, NHS client or if they have another type of payment plan that you work with in your practice..