Built by combining three sources — official NHS data, community reports from people like you, and direct confirmations from dentists themselves. No single source tells the whole story.
Getting an NHS dentist in England is hard enough. Finding out which practices are actually accepting patients right now is harder still. Lists open for hours and close again before anyone hears. By the time the NHS website catches up, the spot is gone.
The BBC has been documenting this for years — patients waiting not months but years to register with an NHS dentist, practices overwhelmed, and a patchwork of information that changes faster than any public record can keep up with.
Read the BBC’s coverage →12m+
Adults without a dentist
Over 12 million adults in England don’t have access to an NHS dentist. Many have been trying for years.
Source: Healthwatch England →
9 in 10
Practices not accepting
Around 90% of NHS dental practices across England aren’t currently accepting new adult patients.
Source: House of Commons Library →
£1bn
Of NHS dental funding returned
Between 2023 and 2025, dentists in England returned nearly £1bn in public funding because practices couldn’t meet activity targets under the current contract.
Source: British Dental Journal →
We don’t want you to take any of this at our word. The scale of the NHS dental crisis is documented extensively by parliament, think tanks, watchdogs and the press.
The NHS publishes a national list of dental practices and their accepting-patient status. It’s the best public dataset there is, and it’s where we start too. But it has three problems that leave real people making phone calls they didn’t need to make.
It updates on the NHS’s schedule, not reality’s. The official API can lag behind the on-the-ground truth by days or even weeks. During that window, spots open, fill, and close again without ever appearing in the public record.
It relies on practices remembering to update. Each practice is responsible for telling the NHS when their status changes. With the sector under this much pressure, that often doesn’t happen for days — if it happens at all.
It doesn’t capture what people learn on the phone. Plenty of practices say “yes, come in” or “sorry, we’re full” without ever touching their listing. That conversation is the freshest signal there is, and nobody was capturing it.
Every practice on DentistAlert has a single canonical record. It’s informed by three independent sources that we blend in real time.
We pull daily from the NHS Service Search API and the NHS.uk find-a-dentist website. This is the foundation — authoritative metadata (addresses, phone numbers, opening hours) and the NHS’s own accepting-patient status.
When you call a practice, you know something the NHS doesn’t know yet. One tap in our email or on the practice page — “got an appointment”, “they were full”, “couldn’t get through” — adds that signal to the record for everyone searching in your area.
Soon, practices will be able to claim their listing and update their accepting-patient status directly with us — skipping the NHS data-entry queue entirely. Verified practice updates will carry the highest weight in our reliability scoring.
Work at a practice? Get in touch →We do this by combining official NHS data, community reports from people like you, and direct confirmations from dentists themselves. No single source tells the whole story — the NHS dataset is published on a weekly cadence at best, changes on the ground happen daily, and the freshest truth comes from people calling around.
We bring those signals together so nobody has to make a dozen phone calls to find an NHS dentist.
Because we combine three sources, we can be honest about how confident we are in each listing. Every practice on DentistAlert has a reliability score based on three things:
High
Recently verified by NHS data and community reports.
Medium
NHS state is recent but community reports are mixed or sparse.
Low
Data is stale or community reports contradict it. Call to confirm.
New listing
We haven’t built a score yet — newly discovered practice.
We show reliability as a simple badge on every practice page. If a score feels wrong to you, tell us — community reports are the fastest way to correct the record.
If you’ve ever phoned round practices trying to register, you already know the work. Community reports turn that work into something other people benefit from.
After a practice shows up in your alert email, you’ll see three buttons at the bottom — got an appointment, they were full, couldn’t get through. One tap. Ten seconds. No re-login needed. Your report updates the listing for everyone searching your area.
It’s the kind of thing that only works when people actually do it. So please — pay it forward. The last person in the queue had to make dozens of calls. You can save the next person a week of theirs.
Sign up for free alerts. Next time you call a practice, one tap updates the listing for the whole community.