The Borough Blog – May 2020

Dear Patient,

We hope you are keeping well at this extraordinary and difficult time.

We have been communicating extensively with our patients by email during the COVID19 outbreak. If you are a registered patient and have not been receiving email updates from us, please email us your up-to-date email address using the form here

Emergency Service during COVID 19 – Like all dental practices in the UK, as instructed by Government, the Practice has been closed for face-to-face dental appointments since the end of March. However, we have been providing a 7-day a week free emergency and advice service. For the contact number of our dentist on call, please ring the practice on 01725 510303 with a pen and paper handy to write down their mobile number to contact. We will contact our patients directly by email as soon as we are allowed to re-open.

So what have we been up to during the shutdown?

Lobbying Government – Returning to our campaigning days when we ran the oral health charity, Dentaid, my husband Luke and I have been lobbying Government hard to provide an appropriate and practical response to the challenge of providing a dental service during a pandemic. A paper we wrote last month has just been published nationally, and circulated at the highest levels of government, to provide a framework and protocols for the UK dental industry to safely return to work to meet the growing dental emergency need.

We also wrote an innovative paper outlining how the dental industry could be harnessed to provide antibody testing to the wider population, rather than setting up a parallel testing network, potentially saving the Government many millions of pounds. We have subsequently been informed by the Chief Dental Officer that this proposal is being considered very seriously in the national testing strategy.

Free Shopping Service – On a more local level, we are delighted to report that we have now completed more than 150 grocery shops for our self-isolating patients. We have also extended this free service to local front-line NHS staff who may be struggling to find time to shop for themselves or secure an online delivery slot. If you need help with shopping, please visit our website homepage and scroll down to the “COVID 19 response” for more details.

I would like to thank our dental nurses Tash and Amy, Amy’s partner Carl, my husband Luke and our daughter Olivia who have voluntarily been at Waitrose at the crack of dawn twice a week to provide this service. We are also very grateful to Waitrose Salisbury who sponsored us a van for the first eight weeks of the lockdown.

Painting the Practice – One small advantage of the practice being closed is that we have been able to don our painting clothes and re-paint the whole downstairs of the practice, so when patients return, the place should feel lovely and fresh. With Charlie Killick’s surgery and waiting room upstairs recently completed, we are very proud of our practice premises and believe we have one of the smartest and best-equipped practices in the whole region. Thank you for your patience and understanding last year as we completed all the renovations.

Thanks to the lovely weather, we have also just finished painting the whole of the outside of the Practice!

Children at home?  – With our three children at home too, we fully appreciate the challenges parents are under at the moment. Well hopefully Bright Bites can help! In the porch next to the entrance to our dental practice, we are leaving a pile of Bright Bites CD-ROMs free for patients with younger children to come and collect. While a little dated (including videos of a much younger Jenny teaching children to brush their teeth!) Bright Bites was a very innovative learning resource we helped develop at Dentaid for the Department of Health, which was sent to every primary and infant school in England.

Packed full of quizzes, games and videos it matched the National Curriculum in helping children learn about teeth and eating. Hopefully, it can provide an hour of useful learning and entertainment for the children while parents have a cup of tea and a well-earned break from home schooling! We will also be offering a prize for the child with the best score on the “Shoot the bad foods” game in the Kitchen section! Email us with your best score!

Run out of reading materials? – Luke found in our attic last week a box of books given to him by his publisher when his novel, The Fight, was published a few years ago. A gritty, faith-based novel, it was published in the UK, USA and Australia and translated into Dutch for sale in Holland. Free copies are also available in our foyer.

With best wishes,

Jenny