With renting and moving for work becoming more common than ever, people no longer stick with the same multi-generational family dentist Dublin that they used to.
And it’s far too easy when moving into a new area with all the things going on to forget about registering with a local dental surgery. That is until something urgent happens and you are persuaded by severe discomfort to find out who your local practitioner is.
You can make everything an awful lot easier by registering with your dentist before you get to this point. That said, if you are in need of urgent dental care most clinics maintain space on their daily schedule for same-day emergency appointments, so you should get in contact with them as soon as you need to.
Still, it would be a lot easier for you to get emergency dental care with a team that you are already registered with.
Registering with a New Dentist
When you are looking for a new dental surgery, geographic location should only be one of your considerations; it is quite likely that you live within a range of 5 local surgeries in any major city, so unless you’re in a small village, you should be shopping around.
Not all dental surgeries are equal and even among those who are equal in stature, they have different focuses. Perhaps one dental team has built itself around cosmetic treatments and the other around restorative care. Depending on your needs you should find the dental team that fits you.
If you have a dental aversion or any other concerns about seeing a dental professional, finding an empathetic practitioner would be your first priority. There are clinics that have made serving nervous patients their priority and have set up their entire clinic to be homely and as non-dental- surgery-like as possible.
Transferring From a Past Dental Team
If possible, your new dental clinic will want your records transferred from your previous one. Although this used to take several weeks, with most dental records now digitised this has become fairly trivial. It allows your new clinic to continue any treatment procedures started previously, as well as seeing any notes that may have been made about possible risks. That said, most clinics will want to take initial X-rays as a new baseline and as part of your initial assessment and introduction to the clinic.
During a physical examination, there will be a priority to check things like fillings, crowns and any prosthetics which require additional maintenance. Based on this other measurements will be made of plaque levels, pocket depth and measurements so that any gum recession can be tracked; collectively this is referred to as charting and although patients may be unaware of it, it is one of the key methods that dental teams use to see problems before they occur and allow them to be nipped in the bud.
Failure to be registered or regularly attending check-ups with a dental team results in charting becoming patchy and ineffective. This is one of the main things that you lose by not being registered with a team and even if you have no symptoms, maintaining your regular dental check-ups is important for your long-term health.
Related: What to Expect at the Dentist
