An unhurried video appointment with one of our dentists, taken on your own laptop, tablet or phone. We use them for the first assessment before a course of treatment is planned, and for the review appointments that follow it afterwards. There is nothing to download and no account to create — the whole appointment runs in your web browser.
Initial assessments run 30–45 minutes · Follow-up reviews 20–30 minutes · Thursday evening slots up to 19:00
You click the link we email you and the appointment opens in the browser you already use. No app, no account, no software to keep updated.
Between twenty and forty-five minutes depending on what we are looking at. These are real appointments in the diary, not a two-minute triage call.
You can send us photographs during the call, and we can put your existing x-rays and scans on the screen so we are both looking at the same thing.
We started offering video appointments in 2021, initially because we had no choice, and then kept them because two particular conversations turned out to work better this way than squeezed into the end of a chairside appointment while somebody is still numb and holding a suction tube.
The first is the assessment before treatment. If you are considering a crown, a denture, whitening or a longer plan of work, there is a lot to go through: what the options are, what each involves, how long each is likely to last, what it costs and what happens if you do nothing. That conversation takes half an hour to do properly, and doing it by video means having it at home, at a sensible hour, with your partner beside you and a notepad on the table.
The second is the review after treatment. Once a filling, a crown or a new denture has been in for a few weeks, most of what we need to know is something you can tell us and show us: how it feels when you bite, whether anything catches the floss, whether the shade looks right in daylight in your own bathroom mirror. A twenty-minute video review saves you a round trip.
If you are in pain or there is any swelling, please do not book a video appointment. Telephone the practice instead and ask for an emergency slot.
Nothing about this should be a surprise on the day, so here is the whole thing in order. Reception will walk you through any part of it on the telephone if you would rather hear it than read it.
Ring the practice or send the enquiry form and say you would like a video appointment. Reception will ask what it is about, so that they book you the right length — a first assessment needs forty-five minutes in the diary, a short denture review needs twenty. You will be given a date, a time and the name of the dentist you will be speaking to.
The day before your appointment we email you a link. It is unique to your appointment, it works once, and it stops working a couple of hours after your slot has finished. If the email has not arrived by the evening before, check your junk folder first and then ring us — we can resend it in about a minute.
The same email contains a second link to a short check page. It confirms your browser will work, asks your permission to use the camera and microphone, shows you a picture of yourself so you can adjust the light, and measures how much of your connection is available in each direction. It takes about ninety seconds and it is worth doing the day before rather than two minutes before.
Click the link a few minutes before your time and you will land in a waiting screen. The dentist will go through your history, ask what is bothering you or what you are considering, and look at whatever you can show them. Expect to be asked to hold the camera closer, tilt your head towards a window and pull a cheek out of the way with a clean finger. It is undignified and everybody feels silly doing it. It is also genuinely useful.
During the call you can upload photographs straight from your phone, and we can put your existing x-rays, intra-oral photographs and any scan images from previous visits up on the shared screen. This is the part of the appointment that moves the most data, and it is the reason a steady connection matters more here than it does on an ordinary social video call.
Within one working day we email you a summary of what was discussed, the options as we set them out, and, where relevant, a costed treatment plan of exactly the same form you would have been handed at the front desk. Nothing is booked in until you have said yes to it.
Six things, none of them complicated. The one people most often get caught out by is the connection, because a video appointment is a good deal heavier on a home line than reading a page like this one.
Headphones are not required, but they make a noticeable difference to the sound at our end and stop the echo that happens when your speakers feed back into your microphone.
Speeds are per appointment, in each direction, and assume nobody else in the house is doing anything demanding at the same time.
| Situation | Download | Upload |
|---|---|---|
| Absolute minimum — sound only, picture will drop | 1 Mbit/s | 0.5 Mbit/s |
| Workable, standard-definition picture | 2 Mbit/s | 1.5 Mbit/s |
| What we recommend — HD both ways | 5 Mbit/s | 3 Mbit/s |
| Comfortable, with room for photograph uploads | 10 Mbit/s | 5 Mbit/s |
| A busy household with other people online | 25 Mbit/s | 8 Mbit/s |
If you do not know your figures, the check page in your appointment email measures both and tells you plainly whether it expects the appointment to hold up.
It is not the end of the world and it is not unusual, particularly in the villages north of Ashcombe Green. A few things that reliably help:
Nobody is going to be impatient with you about this. Half the practice has fought with the same broadband.
Written out in full because people quite reasonably ask, particularly anyone on a metered connection. A video appointment is not a light thing to run: it is a continuous two-way HD stream for the better part of an hour, with file transfers on top.
| Part of the appointment | Roughly what it uses | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Your picture going to us, HD | 2.5–3.5 Mbit/s | Continuous for the whole appointment. This is the demanding direction on a home line. |
| Our picture coming to you, HD | 2.5–3.5 Mbit/s | Also continuous. Rises briefly when we share an image on screen. |
| The same, dropped to standard definition | 0.8–1.2 Mbit/s | What we fall back to if either end is struggling. |
| Sound only, picture turned off | 0.05–0.1 Mbit/s | Last resort. Perfectly usable for talking, useless for looking. |
| A photograph sent up from your phone | 3–8 MB each | A handful of seconds on a decent upstream, a minute or more on a slow one. |
| An x-ray or intra-oral image we put on screen | 1–4 MB each | Sent to you once, then held on screen for as long as we are discussing it. |
| A three-dimensional scan of an arch | 20–60 MB | Only relevant if you have had a scan taken here previously. |
| Appointment | Length | Approximate total, both directions |
|---|---|---|
| Short follow-up review, HD | 20 minutes | 0.7–1.0 GB |
| Standard follow-up review, HD | 30 minutes | 1.0–1.5 GB |
| Initial assessment, HD, a few photographs | 45 minutes | 1.6–2.4 GB |
| Initial assessment, standard definition throughout | 45 minutes | 0.5–0.8 GB |
These are honest estimates rather than guarantees; the exact figures depend on how much movement there is in the picture and what your device and ours settle on between them. The practical point is simply that a forty-five minute HD appointment moves a couple of gigabytes. On fixed home broadband that is neither here nor there. On a metered mobile plan it is worth knowing about before you join.
If there is any chance of plugging the laptop into the router with a cable, do it. Wireless is fine most of the time, and then it is briefly not fine at exactly the moment somebody walks between you and the router with a microwave running. A cable is the single cheapest improvement available to anyone joining one of these appointments.
If a cable is impractical, sitting in the same room as the router does most of the same job.
It works, and several patients do it, but check your allowance first. Two gigabytes is a meaningful chunk of a small monthly bundle, and if you go over it in the middle of an appointment the call will stop rather than slow down. Somewhere with a strong signal and a stable one are not the same thing either — a train is the worst possible place to take one of these.
If mobile data is your only option, ask us to run the appointment in standard definition from the start.
Most of the useful looking in a video assessment happens through pictures rather than through the live camera. A live webcam picture of the inside of a mouth is, frankly, not very good: the light is wrong, the focus hunts and the image is compressed on its way to us. A still photograph taken on the same phone is enormously better, and it is the thing we will ask you for.
There is an upload button in the appointment window throughout the call. Take the photograph, send it, and it appears on both screens within a few seconds. Two or three shots are usually enough: the tooth in question, the same area with the cheek held out of the way, and a picture of you smiling normally for shade and shape.
From our side, we can put anything already on your record up on the shared screen — previous x-rays, the intra-oral photographs taken at your last examination, and any three-dimensional scan of an arch we have on file. Scans are the largest single item we send, at a few tens of megabytes, and they take a few seconds to arrive on a normal home connection.
Everything shared during an appointment is added to your clinical record in exactly the same way as anything taken in the surgery, and is covered by the same privacy notice. We do not record the video or the audio of the appointment itself.
If your phone cannot manage it, do not worry. Plenty of appointments run perfectly well on conversation and the live camera alone.
Every substantial piece of work here gets a review. A new crown is checked at two to three weeks, a large filling at a month, a new denture at a week and again at a month, and whitening at the end of the course. Historically these were all short chair appointments, and a good number of them existed mainly so that somebody could confirm out loud that everything was fine.
Now, unless there is a specific reason to see you in the chair, we book the review as a twenty to thirty minute video appointment instead. You get the same conversation and the same amount of the dentist’s attention, in the evening if that suits you better, without a half-day off work and a drive.
If anything at the review suggests we need to look properly — a bite that needs adjusting, a denture edge that needs easing, a filling that is still sensitive after a month — we say so and book you in there and then. Roughly one review in five ends that way, which is about what we expected.
Reviews of work carried out here are included in the original fee, whether they happen in the chair or on a screen.
The length is decided when you book, and reception will pick it based on what you tell them the appointment is about. It matters more than it sounds, because the whole point of these is to be unhurried — and because you will want to know how long you are tying up the household connection.
| Appointment | Booked for | Fee |
|---|---|---|
| Initial assessment before a course of treatment | 45 minutes | £42 |
| Shorter assessment, one specific question | 30 minutes | £32 |
| Discussion of a written treatment plan already sent to you | 25 minutes | £32 |
| Review after treatment carried out here | 20–30 minutes | No charge |
| Denture comfort review | 20 minutes | No charge |
| Whitening progress review | 20 minutes | No charge |
| Introductory call for an anxious patient | 20 minutes | No charge |
The fee for an initial assessment is credited in full against the cost of treatment if you go ahead with a plan within three months. If the appointment cannot go ahead because of a connection problem at either end, there is no charge and reception will rebook you or telephone you instead. Our full fee list is on the home page.
We would rather set this out plainly than have you book one expecting something it is not. A camera is a poor substitute for a pair of eyes six inches from a tooth under a proper light, and no amount of bandwidth changes that.
We cannot see between your teeth, which is where a great deal of decay starts. We cannot measure the depth of a gum pocket, which is how gum disease is actually assessed. We cannot tap a tooth, feel whether a filling is loose, dry an area to see it properly or take an x-ray. So a video appointment never ends with a diagnosis presented as settled fact; it ends with a conversation, a plan and an examination booked.
Nor is it the right route for anything urgent. If you are in pain, if there is swelling, if something has broken or come out, telephone the practice on the ordinary number. We hold emergency slots back every weekday morning and you will be dealt with far faster that way.
Reception is on 01632 960 118 from 8:30 on weekdays. Outside opening hours the recorded message gives the current out-of-hours arrangements.
If yours is not here, ring the practice. Reception have taken a lot of these calls and will answer most of it without needing to pass you on.