No magic, no vague promises. Every NHS dental practice in England, checked every week — and every weeknight near our members — with alerts in your inbox by around 8:30am. Here’s the whole pipeline, start to finish.
Most practices fill new openings within hours or days of opening their list. The whole point of this pipeline is making sure you hear early enough to be the first call of the morning.
Every weekend we check every NHS dental practice in England — around 6,400 of them — against the NHS.uk find-a-dentist website. Every weeknight we re-check the practices near our members' saved postcodes. Practice details (names, addresses, phone numbers, opening hours) come from the official NHS Service Search API.
Each check is compared against the record from the previous check. If a practice flips from “not accepting” to “accepting” — for adults, children, or both — that change is flagged. Community reports from people who actually phoned the practice are blended in alongside.
Overnight changes are queued and delivered in one morning batch, so paid members have the alert at the top of their inbox by around 8:30am — right as practice phone lines open. Free members get every change near them in the Monday weekly digest.
The alert has everything you need to act: the practice name, address, phone number, and exactly who they are accepting. You ring the practice directly to register — and paid members get a short call script so the conversation is easy.
Why we say the cadence out loud: plenty of services in this space are vague about how often they really check. Ours is simple — every practice in England every week, every weeknight near members, alerts by ~8:30am. We’d rather you know exactly what you’re getting.
No single source tells the whole story, so every practice record on DentistAlert blends three of them.
The NHS Service Search API gives us authoritative practice details — addresses, phone numbers, opening hours. Our own checks of the NHS.uk find-a-dentist website give us the current accepting-patient status.
When someone calls a practice, they learn something the public record doesn’t know yet. One tap on a practice page or in an alert email — accepting, full, or no answer — adds that signal for everyone nearby.
Coming next: practices will be able to claim their listing and update their status with us directly, skipping the NHS data-entry queue. Verified practice updates will carry the highest weight.
Want the full methodology, evidence, and reliability-scoring formula? Read our mission & methodology page.
Every alert email is built to get you from inbox to phone call in under a minute. No fluff, no login required:
Free members get every change near them in a Monday digest. Paid members get the same changes the morning we spot them.
| Free | Paid (£4.99/mo) | |
|---|---|---|
| When you hear | Monday morning weekly digest | Same morning, by ~8:30am |
| Location profiles | 1 | 1 (Family plan: up to 4 for £8.99/mo) |
| Full practice details & phone numbers | Included | Included |
| Telegram phone alerts | — | Same alert, straight to your phone (WhatsApp coming soon) |
| Follow-up reminders | — | “Still available” nudge the next day |
| Call scripts in emails | — | Included |
| NHS & practice page links in emails | — | Included |
| Price | £0, forever | £4.99/mo after a 7-day free trial |
Both tiers run on the same monitoring pipeline — paid doesn’t buy you better data, it buys you the timing.
No — and we'd rather tell you exactly what we do. Every NHS dental practice in England is checked once a week in a full weekend sweep, and practices near our members' saved postcodes are re-checked every weeknight. That is far more often than anyone could check by hand, and we publish the cadence openly because we think honesty about it matters.
Our checks run overnight, when we can sweep thousands of practice pages without getting in anyone's way. We then deliver everything in one morning batch by around 8:30am — timed so the alert is at the top of your inbox just as practice phone lines open. An alert at 2am helps nobody; an alert at 8:30am puts you first in the queue.
Three places: the official NHS Service Search API (practice details like addresses, phone numbers, and opening hours), our own direct checks of the NHS.uk find-a-dentist website (accepting status), and community reports from people who phone practices and tell us what they heard. No single source tells the whole story — that's why we blend all three.
No, and you should be suspicious of anyone who says they can. Around 9 in 10 practices are not accepting new adult NHS patients, and openings fill quickly. What we can do is make sure that when a practice near you does open its list, you hear about it early and call first.
No. DentistAlert is an independent service that uses publicly available NHS data under the Open Government Licence. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the NHS.
Drop a postcode, pick a radius, and let the pipeline do the checking. Free members get the Monday digest; paid members hear by ~8:30am the morning we spot a change.