Routine access

• NHS dental practices can be found using ‘Find a dentist’ on the NHS website. Unlike GP surgeries, dental patients are not registered to a particular practice or confined to a practice boundary and dentists do not need to be near where you live.
• NHS dental services will have different opening hours and may differ from a practice’s opening hours. Some NHS dental practices may operate their services through a waiting list system.

Urgent access

• If you do not have a regular NHS dentist or cannot find one and require urgent dental treatment, you can access the NHS urgent care service via NHS 111.

Screening is a way of identifying apparently healthy people who may have an increased risk of a particular condition. The NHS offers a range of screening tests to different sections of the population.

The aim is to offer screening to the people who are most likely to benefit from it. For example, some screening tests are only offered to newborn babies, while others such as breast screening and abdominal aortic aneurysm screening are only offered to older people.

There are a number of NHS screening programmes currently offered in England. For more detailed information on each type of screening, follow the links.