Complaints Procedure

We take complaints very seriously at Salisbury Villa Dental. If you’re unhappy with your experience or treatment please contact the practice and a member of our team will be eager to address any of your concerns.

Practice Complaints Procedure

If you have a complaint or concern about the service that you have received from Salisbury Villa Dental Surgery please let us know. We operate a practice complaints procedure as part of the National Health Service system for dealing with complaints.

How to complain:

We expect that most problems will be sorted out easily and quickly at the time they arise and with the person concerned. If this is not the case and you wish to make a formal complaint, please let us know as soon as possible – ideally within a few days or at most a few weeks of the incident occurring. This will enable us to establish facts more easily. If it is not possible to do this please let us have the details of your complaint:

Within 6 months of the incident that caused the problem; or
Within 6 months of your discovering that you have a problem, provided this is within 12 months of the incident.

Complaints should be put in writing and addressed to:

Laura Akast

Salisbury Villa Dental Surgery

1 Salisbury Terrace

Teignmouth

TQ14 8JG

What we will do

We will acknowledge your complaint in writing within 3 working days and will seek to investigate the cause for your complaint within 10 working days of the complaint being received.

We will 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 to do this;
Make sure you receive an apology, where this is found to be appropriate;
Identify what we can do to make sure the problem doesn’t happen again.

If a complaint is about any aspect of clinical care or associated charges it will normally be referred to the dentist, unless you do not want this to happen.

We will confirm the decision about the complaint in writing to you immediately after completing our investigation.

Proper and comprehensive reports are kept of any complaint received.

Complaining on behalf of someone else

Please note that we keep strictly to rules of medical confidentiality. If you are complaining on behalf of someone else, we have to know that you have their permission to do so. A note signed by the person concerned will be needed, unless they are incapable (because of illness) of providing this.

Taking it further

We hope that if you have a problem you will use our practice complaints procedure. We believe that this will give you the best opportunity for a satisfactory solution to your complaint and give us valuable feedback that will help us improve our service to you.

However, if you are not satisfied with the result of our procedure then a complaint can be made to the following organisations:-

Complaints about Private Dental Services

The Dental Complaints Service helps private dental patients and dental professionals resolve complaints about private dental services. It is an independent service funded by the General Dental Council. To seek their help with a private dental complaint, telephone 08456 120540 in office hours (Monday to Friday 9am – 5pm) or fill in the form on their website www.dentalcomplaints.org.uk/