Making judgements about primary care dental services

We do not give a rating to providers of primary dental care services.

Our inspectors make a judgement on whether your service is meeting the necessary legal requirements based on our assessment of the evidence we gather against the key lines of enquiry in the assessment framework for healthcare services.

We also use information gathered from other sources as evidence when we make our judgements. This includes information that that you provide, information from people who use services, other regulators and oversight bodies and other stakeholders and service providers.

When making our judgements, we consider the weight of each piece of relevant evidence. In most cases we seek to verify our evidence with other sources to support our findings. When we have conflicting evidence we will consider its source, how robust it is and which is the strongest. We may conclude that we need to gather additional evidence or seek specialist advice to make a judgement. Sometimes, we may ask you to provide us with further information. We will normally do this within two days of your inspection.