It’s our aim to always have satisfied patients, to meet your expectations of care and service to resolve any complaints as efficiently, effectively, and politely as possible. We take complaints very seriously, investigating them in a full and fair way to take great care to protect your confidentiality. We learn from complaints to improve our care and service. We will never discriminate against patients who have made a complaint, and we will be happy to answer any questions you may have about this procedure.
If you are not entirely satisfied with any aspect of our care or service, please let us know as soon as possible to allow us to address your concerns promptly. We accept complaints made verbally as well as written complaints. If you do not feel you can raise a complaint about your NHS service directly with us, you can address your complaint directly to the patient experience team at enquiries@cheshireandmerseyside.nhs.uk with ‘For the attention of the complaints team’ in the subject line.
Sheena Clarke is the Complaints Manager and will be your personal contact to assist you with any complaints. We aim to resolve verbal complaints within 24 hours where possible, but if you complain in writing the Complaints Manager will send an acknowledgment letter within 3 working days and will aim to provide a full response in writing as soon as practical.
You can send your complaints to:
The Old Forge, 24 Overleigh Road, Handbridge, Chester, Cheshire, CH4 7HL
Call us on 01244 677667
Or email the Complaints Manager on braces@overleighorthodontics.com
If the Complaints Manager is unavailable, we will take brief details about the complaint and will arrange for a meeting when it is suitable for you and the practice. We will keep comprehensive and confidential records of your complaint, which will be stored securely and only be accessible to those who need to know about your complaint. If the complaint investigation takes longer than anticipated, the Complaints Manager will contact you at least every ten working days to keep you informed of the reason for any delays, the progress of the investigation and the proposed date it will be completed.
When the investigation has been completed, you will be informed of its outcome in writing. We will make our response clear, addressing each of your concerns as best as we can. You will also be invited to a meeting to discuss the results and any practical solutions that we can offer to you. These solutions could include replacing treatment, refunding fees paid, referring you for specialist treatments or other solutions that meet your needs and resolve the complaint.
We regularly analyse patient complaints to learn from them and to improve our services. That’s why we always welcome your feedback, comments, suggestions, and complaints. If you are dissatisfied with our response to a complaint, you can take the matter further, please see the contacts below.
If you are dissatisfied with our response to a complaint, you can contact the below for NHS or Private complaints.
NHS Complaints
If you are still unhappy about your NHS complaint, you can contact the Patient advice and liaison service, Patient experience team, NHS Cheshire and Merseyside, No 1 Lakeside, 920 Centre Park Square, Warrington, WA1 1QY.
Telephone: 0800 132996
Email: enquiries@cheshireandmerseyside.nhs.uk
OR
The Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman, City Gate, Mosley Street, Manchester, M2 3HQ. Email phso.enquiries@ombudsman.org.uk
Telephone 0345 015 4033
www.ombudsman.org.uk
Private Complaints
GDC private dental complaints service can be contacted by calling 020 82530800 or visiting www.dentalcomplaints.org.uk.
The practice keeps records of your name, address, date of birth and details of any health problems as well as details of your dental treatment and details about your family. We keep this information so that we can provide you with the best dental care. Your personal information is kept very confidentially and securely.
We only use your personal information so we can give you the best dental care and for sending reminders to you.
We only pass your personal information to another dentist, doctor, or hospital if you have a problem that requires their special skills, and you need to go and see them. We will not give your information to anyone else unless the law allows us to, or we must provide it for legal reasons.
If you leave the practice, we will stop using your information, but will keep it confidentially and securely until you are 25 years old (or 26 years old if you were 17 when your last treatment ended), or for 15 years (NHS patient)/11 years (private patient) after the completion of treatment, whichever is longer.
We will then review if and when we can delete it. You can always ask for a copy of the information we hold for you; we can transfer it to another dentist or doctor at your request and you can ask us to stop using your personal information to send letters or contact you in
other ways if you are no longer a patient at the practice. When you reach 18 years of age the Privacy Notice about how we process your personal information will change to the adult version. This can be found on our website.
If you would like a copy of the information we hold about you or if you have any other enquiries such as correcting an error in your information or providing a copy of your information to somebody else, please contact:
The Information Governance Lead, Sheena Clarke:
Overleigh Orthodontics, The Old Forge, 24 Overleigh Road, Chester, CH4 7HL
Email: braces@overleighorthodontics.com
Phone: 01244 677667
Overleigh Orthodontics takes it very seriously if a member of staff or other patients are treated in an abusive or violent manner.
The practice supports the NHS zero tolerance campaign for Health Service Staff. This states that all staff have a right to care for others without fear or being attacked or abused. To successfully provide these services a mutual respect between all staff and patients must be in place. All staff members aim to be polite, helpful, and sensitive to the individual needs of our patients.
We would respectfully remind patients that very often staff could be confronted with a multitude of varying and sometimes difficult tasks and situations all at the same time. However aggressive behaviour be it violent or abusive this will not be tolerated and may result in you being removed from the practice list and in some cases the police being contacted.
For the practice to maintain good relations we would like to ask all of our patients to read and take note of the occasional types of behaviour that would be found to be unacceptable.
- Using bad language or swearing at practice staff.
- Any physical violence towards any member of staff or other patients, such as pushing and shoving.
- Verbal abuse towards the staff in any form.
- Racial abuse and sexual harassment.
- Persistent or unrealistic demands that cause stress to staff will not be accepted, requests will be met wherever possible, and explanations given when they cannot.
We ask that you always treat your orthodontists and their staff courteously.
Removal from the practice list
A good patient orthodontist relationship based on mutual respect and trust is the cornerstone of good patient care. The removal of patients from our treatment list is an exceptional and rare event and is a last resort in an impaired patient practice relationship. When trust has irretrievably broken down it is in the patient’s best interest just as much as that of the practice, that they should find a new practice. We support the transfer of such patients care to a new provider by providing the necessary clinical information and any appropriate documentation relating to the patient.
The practice aims to meet the requirements of the Data Protection Act 2018, the United Kingdom General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR), the guidelines on the Information Commissioner’s (ICO) website as well as our professional guidelines and requirements.
The data controller is Overleigh Orthodontics Ltd, the Information Governance Lead is Sheena Clarke NHS: who is also the Data Protection Officer.
This Privacy Notice is available on the practice website at https://www.overleighorthodontics.com/ at reception/ by email if you contact braces@overleighorthodontics.com/ by calling 01244 677667
You will be asked to provide personal information when joining the practice. The purpose of processing your personal data is to provide you with optimum dental health care and prevention.
The categories and examples of data we process are:
- Personal data for the provision of dental health care
- Personal data for the purposes of providing treatment plans, recall appointments, reminders, or estimates
- Personal data such as details of family members for the provision of health care to children for emergency contact details
- Personal data for the purposes of employed and self-employed team members’ employment and engagement, respectively
- Personal data for the purposes of direct mail/email/text to inform you of appointments and recall appointments.
- Personal data – IP addresses so that we can understand our patients better and
- inform our marketing approach as well as improve the website experience
- Special category data including health records for the purposes of the delivery of
- health care and meeting our legal obligations
- Special category data including health records
- Special category data to meet the requirements of the Equality Act 2010
- Special category data details of criminal record checks for employees and contracted team members
We minimise the data that we keep and do not keep it for longer than necessary.
We never pass your personal details to a third party unless we have a contract for them to process data on our behalf and will otherwise keep it confidential. If we intend to refer a patient to another practitioner or to secondary care such as a hospital, we will gain the individual’s permission before the referral is made and the personal data is shared. Your data will be shared with the NHS if you are having NHS treatment.
Personal data is obtained when a patient joins the practice or when a patient is referred to the practice.
For full details or where your data is stored, please ask to see Information Governance Procedures .
We have established the following lawful bases for processing your data:
Our lawful bases for processing personal data:
- The legitimate interests of the dental practice
- Processing is necessary for the performance of a contract with the data subject or to take steps to enter into a contract
- Consent of the data subject
- To comply with our legal obligations
Our Article 9 conditions for processing special category data:
- Processing is necessary for health care purposes
- Processing necessary for identifying or keeping under review the existence or absence of equality of opportunity or treatment between groups of people with the view to enabling such equality to be promoted or maintained
- We obtain consent of the data subject to process criminal record checks.
The reasons we process the data include:
- To maintain your contemporaneous clinical records
- To provide you with orthodontic treatment, prevention, and oral health advice
- To carry out financial transactions with you
- To send your personal data to the General Dental Council or other authority as required by law
- To communicate with you as and when required, including appointment reminders, treatment plans, estimates, and other communications about your treatment or the practice
- To communicate with your next of kin in an emergency
- If a parent or carer, to communicate with you about the person you parent or care for
- To refer you to other dentists or doctors and health professionals as required
- To obtain criminal record disclosures for team members
- For debt recovery
- To continually improve the care and service you receive from us
The personal data we process includes:
Your name, address, gender, date of birth, NHS number, medical history, dental history, family medical history, family contact details, marital status, financial details for processing payment, your doctor’s details, and details of treatment at the practice. We may process more sensitive special category data including ethnicity, race, religion, or sexual orientation so that we can meet our obligations under the Equality Act 2010 or, for example, to modify treatment to suit your religion and to meet NHS obligations.
The retention period for special data in patient records is a minimum of 15 years and may be longer for complex records or to meet our legal requirements. The retention period for other personal data is 2 years after it was last processed. Details of retention periods are available in the Record Retention procedure available from the practice.
We obtain your personal details when you enquire about our care and service, when you join the practice, when you complete a registration or medical history form, and when another practitioner refers you for treatment at our practice. Occasionally, patients are referred to us from other official sources such as NHS clinics or hospitals. You have the following personal data rights:
- The right to be informed about the collection and use of your personal data
- The right of access – to have a copy of the data we hold about you. Generally, we will not charge for this service
- The right to rectification – to correct the data we have if it is inaccurate or incomplete
- The right to deletion of your personal data (clinical records must be retained for a certain time period)
- The right to restrict processing of your personal data
- The right to data portability – to have your data transferred to someone else
- The right to object to the processing of your personal data
- Rights in relation to automated decision making and profiling
Further details of these rights can be seen in our Information Governance Procedures or at the Information Commissioner’s website. Here are some practical examples of your rights:
- If you are a patient of the practice, you have the right to withdraw consent for important notifications, newsletters, surveys, or marketing. You can inform us to correct errors in your personal details or withdraw consent from communication methods such as telephone or email. You have the right to obtain a free copy of your patient records within one month.
- If you are not a patient of the practice, you have the right to withdraw consent for processing personal data, to have a free copy of it within one month, to correct errors in it, or to ask us to delete it. You can also withdraw consent from communication methods such as telephone, email, or text.
We have carried out a Privacy Impact Assessment in Sensitive Information Map, PIA, and Risk Assessment, and you can request a copy from the details below. The details of how we ensure security of personal data is in our Security Risk Assessment and Information Governance Procedures.
Comments, suggestions, and complaints: Please contact the IG Lead at the practice for a comment, suggestion, or a complaint about your data processing at pm@overleighorthodontics.com or by telephone on 01244 677667, or by writing to or visiting the practice at 24 Overleigh Road, Handbridge, Chester, CH4 7HL. We take complaints very seriously.
If you are unhappy with our response or if you need any advice, you should contact the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). Their telephone number is 0303 123 1113, you can also chat online with an advisor. The ICO can investigate your claim and take action against anyone who’s misused personal data. You can also visit their website for information on how to make a data protection complaint.
Related practice procedures: You can also use these contact details to request copies of the following practice policies or procedures:
- Data Protection and Information Security Policy, Consent Policy
- Sensitive Information Map, PIA and Risk Assessment, Information Governance Procedures, Record Retention
If you have an enquiry or a request, please contact the Information Governance Lead: Sheena Clarke, IG Lead Overleigh Orthodontics 24 Overleigh Road, Handbridge, Chester, CH4 7HL Email: braces@overleighorthodontics.com Phone: 01244 677667