Late Cancellation/Failed Attendance Policy

 

At Arnold Street Dental, our priority is to provide you with high-quality dental care in a timely and efficient manner. To help us achieve this goal, we kindly request that you provide us with at least two full working days’ notice for any rescheduling or cancellations of appointments. Rescheduling or cancellation of an appointment with less than ‘Two Full Working Days’ notice usually means that we are unable to re-allocate the time to other patients. This leads to lost treatment time, which can then only be covered by increasing charges to our patients.

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We understand that unexpected circumstances can arise and we will take them into account. However, in cases where you need to cancel an appointment with less than two full working days’ notice, a fee may apply to cover our costs. Our late cancellation policy is as follows:

 

Efficient Running

 

Running an efficient appointment system where patients give us notice if they are unable to attend a dental appointment, means we minimise wasted treatment time and can keep waiting lists down.

 

Minimum Notice – ‘Two Full Working Days’

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We aim to be fair to our patients and widely publicise our cancellation policy, which requires two full working days’ notice to cancel or move an appointment. This information is printed in our welcome packs and displayed in our waiting area and communicated with our appointment reminders. If you cancel an appointment at shorter notice a charge will be automatically added to your account as outlined in our ‘Late Cancellation & Re-booking policy’ below.

 

Why Two Working Days’ Notice?

 

We ask for two working days’ notice to change, cancel or move an appointment as this gives us an opportunity to re-allocate the time to another patient.

We also print and prepare day-lists 48 hours in advance, so a cancellation at shorter notice means we need to reprint complete day lists and potentially loose valuable treatment time which along with our staffing costs and overheads still has to be funded.

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Late Cancellation & Re-booking

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1. In the first instance of a late cancellation we will give you the opportunity to rearrange the appointment and simply pay a fee of $20 to cover administration costs.
 

2. In the second instance of a late cancellation a charge will be made based on our basic running costs per surgery; this is based on a cost of $3 per minute of appointment duration. Whilst this charge will not fully cover the cost of the lost treatment time it will allow us to pay our team and to partly cover our overheads which helps to prevent raising our prices unnecessarily.
 

3. In the third instance of a late cancellation we reserve the right to charge the full cost of the lost clinical/treatment time and to suspend your registration at our practice.
Further appointments will then only be bookable after settlement of your account and full payment made in advance for all future appointments.
 

Late cancellation charges must be settled within 14 days of the appointment date.

Failure to settle these within 60 days of the original appointment will result in the account being sent to a 3rd party recovery agency. Their charges and fees will be in addition to the outstanding balance. We may also ask you to pay in advance for future appointments.

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Understanding

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We appreciate your understanding of our late cancellation policy in helping to run an efficient appointment system to help us help as many patients as possible. We will always take exceptional circumstances into account if the unforeseen happens and on the rare occasion you have the need to cancel an appointment at short notice. 

To help us run our appointment system as efficiently as possible we may text or call you to see if you can attend an earlier appointment – if this earlier appointment does not suit you please feel reassured that your original appointment time will not be affected.
These measures will help us help the maximum number of patients, shorten waiting times and also help mitigate fee increases.

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Thank you for your understanding and support.