Experience: Dental services

  • NICE indicator
  • IND289
  • Published:
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Indicator

Patient experience of primary care: dental services.

Indicator type

Network / system level indicator. The indicator would be appropriate to understand and report on the performance of networks or systems of providers.

This document does not represent formal NICE guidance. For a full list of NICE indicators, see our menu of indicators.

To find out how to use indicators and how we develop them, see our NICE indicator process guide.

Rationale

Patients' experience of the care and service they receive from healthcare services is recognised internationally as a key measure of healthcare quality. This overarching indicator focuses on measuring people's experience of NHS dental services. The questions used to assess quality of care are consistent with NICE's guideline on patient experience in adult NHS services and NICE's quality standard on patient experience. The indicator also aligns with NICE's recommendation that adults should see a dentist at least once every 2 years in NICE's guideline on dental checks.

Specification

Numerator: Weighted number of people reporting an overall good experience of NHS dental services.

Denominator: Weighted number of people who used NHS dental services in the last 2 years.

Calculation: Weighted percentage of people reporting an overall good experience ('very good' or 'fairly good') of NHS dental services based on the following question from the GP Patient Survey (GPPS).

Overall, how would you describe your experience of NHS dental services?

  • Very good

  • Fairly good

  • Neither good nor poor

  • Fairly poor

  • Very poor.

Exclusions: Respondents aged 16 and 17 are not reported to maintain consistency with previous years.

Data source: GPPS.

Expected population size:

The NHS-IPSOS/IPSOS MORI 2023 GPPS: national results and trends, weighted base for question 51, and Office for National Statistics 2024 analysis of population estimates tool for UK show that 0.67% (389,076 divided by 57,690,323) of people aged 16 and over registered with a GP practice in England had used NHS dental services in the last 2 years, and responded to the question about overall experience of NHS dental services: 67 people per average practice of 10,000 patients served by a network. There is no minimum number of patients required for network level indicators. However, consideration should be given to whether the majority of results would require suppression because of small numbers.

The number of respondents to the survey has been consistently more than 600,000 nationally (response rates of around 30% consistently).

ISBN: 978-1-4731-6859-6