Patient Update

And so, for our patient newsletter for August, I find myself reflecting on the fact that this is one of the most unusual Augusts I can remember for a long time because my Children are now much bigger, need less and less attention in August, and we are not going on holiday as a family this month either.

It means that I will be in and around the practice for the whole of August, probably for the first time in 20 years and certainly for the first time in our new and current building, and it is a wonderful change of pace.

Dentistry works in seasons. Nobody really wants to have major dentistry done over the Christmas holidays, and fewer and fewer people want to have major dentistry done over the August summer holiday period. 

Then there is a small gap in the middle of the Christmas holidays and the summer holidays, where the workload is lighter, and the space is greater because there are also fewer external commitments for us, like teaching or research or those types of things that fill up the gaps in our schedule.

So, in August, I find myself with more time available than I usually have in the rest of the year. I have more time to think about the future, more time to think about innovation, more time to think about development (and more time to ride my bike in the sunshine).

So, for this month, we have a variety of things you may be interested in hearing about. 

The first is the launch of our Total Care Club.

This is a hugely innovative and different type of general dental service we provide here at The Campbell Clinic.

The Total Care Club is a capitation service (pay monthly) that covers a wide range of treatments and provides security for patients in a world where security and predictability in accessing dental care are disappearing by the day.  We have designed and launched this service this year in response to the shrinking and disappearing "normal dentistry" services throughout the UK.

In many places it seems that all anyone is interested in is very white "composite bonding" or braces or veneers and dentistry is so much more than that, at least to us here at TCC.

We believe that routine dentistry is about health, prevention and care, and The Total Care Club is all about those things.

We've had an unbelievable response to this service, and we're now rolling out the benefits and development for people in the practice.

One small benefit of our Total Care Club service is that parents can bring their children in for check-ups during the holidays. 

This will take place in the October half-term and will be superhero-themed for the kids (team members dressed up as superheroes just to make it fun and different for coming to the dentist). If you would like more information about this, please get in touch here! 

Having taken three kids past the point of needing to be brought for their own dental check-ups, my wife and I understand the difficulty and stress of these things. Trying to make it as easy as possible for our Total Care Club is one of the small ways that we're changing things and making them different and better.

If you are a member of our Total Care Club, you also receive huge benefits for children's dentistry, such as 10% off of our orthodontic service for Children who need braces.

Open Days

On another note, over the past year or two, we introduced the concept of open days to the practice for people interested in different services.

We do this for dental implant patients and orthodontic patients! 

It means that if you're interested in exploring the possibility of this type of treatment, you can come on one of these open days and get various aspects of diagnostic treatment free of charge included in the open day.

You can have a look at our upcoming Orthodontic Open Day here. 

Our next orthodontic open day is the 5th of September, so if you're interested in having an uncommitted conversation about the possibility of braces or aligners to improve the way your teeth look, come and see us. 

Social Legacy Projects

In August, we have the ability to just refocus on what we're doing with our social legacy projects and our charity commitments that we have at the practice, which for us is a huge part of what we do and a huge part of who we are.

We continue to contribute 1% of our turnover to social legacy projects. One of the things we have coming up is a bake sale at the practice on the 21st of August. Even I will be baking things for the bake sale (I do an extraordinary millionaire's shortbread, which should not be a thing that dentists make), so if you'd like to contribute to this to help us raise some money or if you'd like to come along to buy some cakes from a dental practice (unusual!), then please stick it in your diary and come and see us.

As a team, we're also competing in the Dragon Boat Race in Newark for our friends at the Children's Bereavement Centre. 

If you'd like to help us raise money for that, the link to our fundraising page is here. We'd really appreciate any help. The money we raise from the bake sale will go towards this. 

The phrase we've got at the practice is, "If you're not rowing, then get the cash flowing", so let's see how much money we can raise for the wonderful team at The Children's Bereavement Centre in Newark. 

We'll continue to keep you updated with our charity projects, including, in November, our Christmas Charity Ball, a Christmas-themed fancy dress ball that we're running for the eighth time and raises extraordinary sums of money for our social legacy projects. We'll show you some pictures of that at the time.

More News

Finally, we're obviously here to continue providing extraordinary dentistry to you, whether it's through the Total Care Club, our referral service for local dentists, or our direct-from-the-public service for all our services, such as dental implants, braces, root fillings, crowns, bridges, gum disease treatment, hygiene treatment, imaging, and everything else.

We're expanding our team, as we seem to do on a month-by-month basis at the moment. 

We've appointed two new dental nurses, and our amazing receptionist, Jess, has decided to train as a dental nurse, too. She will start her training in September.

We've appointed several new dentists to the team over the past few months, including Shaun Sellars, who runs our general dental service, Nilesh who will be coming to provide us support with our root treatment service and Matt, who's our endodontist, will also be helping to provide parts of our general dental service.

As always, if you need anything or you have any friends or family who are struggling to access care or need our help, please just contact our lovely reception team. We'll make arrangements to see you and see how we can help.

Have a wonderful summer.

See you in September when the nights are drawing in.