What Does the GDC Tell Patients to Ask Before Dental Treatment Abroad?

Which questions does the GDC's leaflet tell patients to ask?

The General Dental Council publishes a page for patients called "Going abroad for dental treatment", and the part of it that survives being read out of context is a list. Under the heading "Questions to ask", the regulator introduces the list with a single line — "You may want to ask:" — and then sets out twelve questions. We counted the twelve items ourselves in the page text we fetched from the regulator's own site rather than relying on any summary of it. Nothing in that list ranks a clinic, a country, or a price. It is the closest thing in published United Kingdom material to a set of questions a patient can carry into a consultation, and it is written by the body that registers dentists in the United Kingdom rather than by anyone selling treatment.

The first four questions on the GDC list concern who does the work and what can be shown for it. The regulator's wording is: "Who will be carrying out my treatment and what qualifications do they have?" · "Will the dental team speak English? If not, will you provide a translator?" · "Do you have any references or testimonials from previous patients?" · "How many times have you carried out the procedure I am having? What are the rates of success, complication, readmission and infection?" Read together, these four ask for things that exist as records: a name, a qualification, a count, a rate. None of them asks for an impression, and the fourth asks a clinic for numbers about its own outcomes.

The middle four questions on the GDC list move from the operator to the arrangement. The regulator's wording is: "Are you regulated by a professional body and are you registered with them?" · "Is the work guaranteed for a certain period of time?" · "What aftercare do you provide?" · "What happens if I am unhappy with the results? Who pays for the extra flights, hotel and remedial work?" The last of those is one of two places on the GDC's list where the cost of putting something right is raised — the ninth question, quoted in the next paragraph, raises it again — and in both places it is raised as a question the patient is told to put to the provider, not as a figure the regulator supplies.

The final four questions on the GDC list concern what happens after the work is finished. The regulator's wording is: "If there are complications and I need further treatment, is this included in the initial cost?" · "Do you have insurance to cover this procedure?" · "Do you have a complaints system in place? Can I see a copy of it?" · "Who can I contact for advice after the treatment?" The eleventh item is the only one on the list that asks for a document rather than an answer. A complaints procedure that can be produced on request and read before treatment is a different kind of object from a verbal assurance that one exists.

Two observations about the shape of that list are our own, and we mark them as ours. The first is that the page ends on the list: in the text we fetched, the body of the page finishes with the twelfth question and there is no section that answers any of them. The second follows from it — the regulator is doing something narrower than it is often read as doing. It is not telling readers what the answers should be, nor which answers would be acceptable. It is telling readers which questions have answers that can be checked, and leaving the checking to the reader.

The same GDC page carries a passage that applies directly to readers who have not yet left the United Kingdom. Under the heading "Overseas providers coming to the UK to promote their services", the regulator writes: "It is possible that what takes place at these events may constitute the practice of dentistry – for example, assessments and advice. If people who are not registered dental professionals are practising dentistry in the UK, they are breaking the law." The page describes the events plainly — "by holding events in hotels or other venues" — and adds that some of the people at them may be registered here. That last possibility is why the regulator's own advice is to check rather than to assume in either direction.

The page opens by naming what it is for, and the framing is a question rather than a warning. The GDC writes: "Before you commit to travelling abroad for dental treatment, it’s important you are fully aware of what to expect and what risks are involved. You may know how to raise concerns about your dental treatment in the UK, but are you familiar with the process in a foreign country?" It closes the question section in the same register: "Don’t be afraid to ask lots of questions, even if they seem blunt or obvious. If you are not satisfied with the answers you are given, don’t feel you have to commit to anything that day." The regulator is describing an asymmetry in familiarity, not in quality.

What does the GDC say about speaking to your own dentist first?

The General Dental Council's page states it in one sentence: "It’s always a good idea to speak to your own dentist before considering travelling abroad for your treatment, as they may be able to offer advice based on your dental history." The regulator gives a second reason immediately afterwards: "They will also need to be aware of your plans in case of any later complications." The two reasons are not the same. The first is about information the treating clinic does not have; the second is about a person who may be asked to deal with a consequence months later. The GDC states both without attaching any timescale to either.

The same page describes the consultation that often comes first, and it describes it without endorsement or warning. The regulator writes: "Some overseas clinics will have a UK base offering initial consultations in this country before you travel abroad for treatment while others may offer free consultations if you’re prepared to travel." It then adds what the consultation is for: "This is your chance to ask as many questions as possible so you can feel safe and confident in your decision." The GDC treats the consultation as an opportunity to ask, which is consistent with the twelve questions the same page publishes further down.

On what a consultation should contain, the GDC is specific. The regulator writes: "You should always be assessed by a qualified dentist before being given a treatment plan and cost estimate." It then sets out what the assessing dentist should ask for: "As part of your initial consultation, the dentist carrying out your assessment should ask for your full medical history. They should also be interested in your general health, whether you have suffered from any serious illnesses in the past, if you suffer from any chronic medical condition, whether you smoke, and if you’ve had surgery or a general anaesthetic in the past." That sentence describes an intake, and an intake is observable: it either happens or it does not.

What the GDC does not attach to any of this is a period. We scanned the three United Kingdom official documents that address treatment received abroad — the NHS Business Services Authority knowledge base article, the NHS England policy document, and the GDC page quoted here — for expressions of duration, and the result needs stating precisely rather than roundly. The GDC page carries no numbered period at all. The NHS England policy carries none either, and its only expression of duration is the unnumbered phrase "within a reasonable timeframe". The NHSBSA article does carry one numbered period: it names the NHS entitlement "Further treatment within 2 months", and it names it inside the sentence that says that entitlement does not apply where the original treatment was not provided by the current contract provider. That sentence is quoted in full further down this page. So the one numbered period in this corpus belongs to re-treatment inside NHS dentistry, and it is written down in order to be switched off rather than to be granted; no document in the corpus attaches a numbered period to work received abroad. We record that as a measurement rather than an inference: the commands, the corpus and the raw counts are kept under our working directory so the scan can be repeated against us.

NHS England's own policy answers a narrower question that readers often merge with this one. In its document "Avoidance of doubt: Clinical policy for self-funded dental treatment requiring NHS intervention", published under reference PRN00784, NHS England writes: "Where a patient has received their care previously does not impact on their eligibility for NHS care in the future." The same policy sets out where a person may present: "Patients may present directly to primary or secondary dental or medical care settings, or via 111 urgent assessment and referral." That eligibility for urgent NHS care and entitlement to have finished work redone are two separate questions is our reading of the policy's scope rather than a sentence the policy contains, and we mark it as ours.

The money side is answered in one direction only, and by a different NHS page. On the NHS "Treatment abroad checklist", under the heading "Reimbursement for dental treatment", the page states in a single sentence: "You cannot get reimbursement for dental treatment." The heading and the sentence are two separate elements of that page and we quote them as two. That sentence closes the question of whether the original treatment can be claimed back. It does not open the question of who pays for repair afterwards, and the same NHS checklist's aftercare advice is written entirely for the period before the flight home — it tells readers to be clear about how aftercare will be coordinated and to stay long enough to recover before travelling. In the text we fetched there is no line addressed to the period after arrival home.

One more sentence from the same GDC page belongs here because it names the practical reason for asking early. Writing about United Kingdom events run by overseas providers, the regulator states: "Any patient who receives illegal dental treatment is placing themselves at risk as they will not be protected by the rigorous regulatory system that we have in place in the UK." It then states the other half without hedging: "However, it is possible that some of the people involved in these events will be UK registered dental professionals, and we would always recommend that patients check this is the case before receiving any treatment or advice." Both halves are the regulator's, and only checking separates them.

What does the GDC say it cannot guarantee about regulators in other countries?

The General Dental Council states the limit of its own reach in two sentences on its patient page about going abroad for dental treatment: "All dental professionals must be registered with us to work in the UK, and we set the professional standards they must adhere to. We can’t guarantee another organisation like us exists in other countries, or even that the standards will be the same as they are here." The subject of that second sentence matters. What the regulator declines to guarantee is the existence of a counterpart body and the content of its standards. It is a statement about institutions, not about any clinic, any city, or any patient's outcome.

That distinction is easy to lose and worth holding. A regulator saying it cannot vouch for another country's regulatory architecture is not the same as a regulator saying that treatment in another country is unsafe, and the GDC page does not say the second thing anywhere in the text we fetched. We do not say it either, and our own publishing rules forbid us from converting an institutional statement into a country-level quality verdict. The reading we draw from it is narrower, and it is ours rather than the regulator's: the guarantee a United Kingdom patient implicitly relies on at home is a guarantee about a system, and what the regulator has published is that it cannot vouch for the existence of the equivalent system elsewhere.

Having stated the limit, the GDC turns it into two questions the reader can put to a specific country rather than to the world. The regulator writes: "Dental regulation is likely to vary according to country, so it’s a good idea to do some initial research. Does that country have a professional regulatory body? Is it compulsory for dental professionals to be registered with them?" The second question is the sharper of the two. A country can have a professional body whose register is voluntary, and in that case membership answers a different question from the one a United Kingdom patient thinks they are asking.

The GDC then says what to look for if such a body exists: "If there is a regulatory body, you may want to visit their website to find out about the standards they enforce, what qualifications dental professionals must have and who to contact if you have a complaint about your treatment." Three separable things are named there — enforced standards, required qualifications, and a complaints contact — and each of them is a published artefact or it is not. The regulator is describing a lookup, not a judgement. Where the lookup returns nothing, that result is itself information, and it is information the reader obtains rather than borrows.

The body that handles private dental complaints inside the United Kingdom describes its own scope in similar terms. The Dental Complaints Service, which is funded by the GDC, writes: "We provide a free and impartial service across the UK about private dental care. We cannot help with: NHS dentistry (HSC in Northern Ireland) legal advice." On its longer scope page the service also states: "The DCS can help with complaints about private dental services only." The exclusions it publishes are stated by name, and NHS dentistry and legal advice are two of them.

What we can add here is a measurement rather than a conclusion, and the difference is the whole point. Across the Dental Complaints Service pages we fetched, the words "abroad" and "overseas" did not appear at all — not in the covered list and not in the excluded list. So the accurate statement is that the question of treatment received outside the United Kingdom is not addressed on those pages in either direction. It would be wrong to write that the service excludes treatment received abroad, because the documents do not say that; they define the service's scope positively, in terms of private dental care in the United Kingdom.

Where the service does describe itself, it describes both its reach and its limits in its own words. On what it covers, it writes: "We can help resolve complaints about private dental services", and on timing: "We can help with private dental complaints that are: raised with us within 12 months of the treatment taking place, or within 12 months of you becoming aware there was an issue with your care." On the legal route running alongside it, the same page states: "It is important to note that when progressing a complaint legally there is a time limit of three years from the time you became aware, if you are seeking compensation/damages." Two different clocks are described, and they are not the same clock.

The service is also explicit about what its process cannot produce, and this is the sentence that most changes how the earlier questions read. It writes: "We are an impartial and independent service, which means that we cannot compel dental professionals to respond in a particular way or to accept liability." On the outcome of its mediation, its process page states: "In cases where you and dental professional are unable to reach an agreement, they will make a recommendation on how to resolve the complaint. It is important to note this is not legally binding." The GDC's own complaints guide sets out the route in steps, and its second step directs a patient to the NHS for NHS care and to this service for private care.

How is a UK dental registration recorded, and what does the register show?

The General Dental Council states the legal basis for its register in one sentence on its own page about the registers: "We have a legal duty under the Dentists Act to publish our registers and we do this by providing a complete copy online." Two things follow from that sentence and neither is decorative. The register is published because a statute requires it, so its existence does not depend on the regulator's discretion; and what is published is described as a complete copy rather than a summary or a selection. A patient looking someone up is therefore consulting the primary record, not a directory compiled by a third party from it.

The same GDC page states what the public copy contains. Under the line "The following information is publicly available on the registers:" the regulator lists six items — status, registration number, registrant type, date first registered, date current period of registration from, and qualifications. It also states one exclusion in its own words: "Telephone numbers are not part of the public register." On searching, the page says: "You can search a specific register by entering either a name, town or any combination of these." A name and a town are exactly what a patient is likely to have after an initial consultation.

The same page is equally explicit about what the register does not record: "We do not record whether a registrant is practising or retired or, if practising, providing treatment on a private or NHS basis or both." We quote that sentence and nothing around it, and the reason is a finding from our own source audit. The two sentences that follow it on the GDC page direct readers to NHS Primary Care Trusts, bodies our audit recorded as abolished in 2013. The sentence we quote is accurate and current; the paragraph it sits in is not, and summarising the paragraph would have published a route to an organisation that no longer exists.

Who must appear on that register is set out by the GDC on a separate patient page: "By law, all dentists, dental nurses, dental technicians, dental hygienists, dental therapists, clinical dental technicians and orthodontic therapists who provide your dental care must be registered with us." The list is worth reading slowly because it is longer than most people expect. It is not only the person holding the drill. On its page about providers promoting services here, the regulator states the same requirement in a different form: "To work legally and safely all dental professionals must be registered with the GDC, and only people who are registered with us can legally practise dentistry in the UK."

Putting the two halves of the GDC's own page together is a join we make rather than one the page makes, and made that way the register answers a narrow question very well and a broad question not at all. It answers whether a named person holds a registration, of what type, since when, and with what qualifications recorded. It does not answer whether that person is currently seeing patients, whether they work privately or within the NHS, or anything about the quality of their work. Reading a registration as a quality signal would be reading into the record something the regulator's own sentence says is not recorded there. The regulator does not draw that conclusion for the reader; where we draw it, we mark it as ours.

This is also where the GDC's question list and the GDC's register meet. The fifth item on the leaflet's list — "Are you regulated by a professional body and are you registered with them?" — is a question whose answer is checkable in the United Kingdom against a statutory public copy, free of charge, by name and town. Whether the same question is checkable elsewhere depends on whether the country in question publishes a comparable record, which is the point the regulator makes when it says it cannot guarantee that a counterpart body exists. The clause that follows is our summary of those two published statements rather than a sentence either of them contains: the question travels, and the lookup does not necessarily travel with it.

The regulator says plainly that it expects the lookup to be done, and it says so on the page about overseas providers rather than in the technical pages about the register. Its wording is: "We maintain a list of everyone who is registered with the GDC and we would always recommend that patients check that their treatment or advice is being provided by someone who is legally allowed to practice dentistry in the UK." The instruction and the record are published by the same body, which is why this particular check is unusually cheap. The list is free, the search takes a name and a town, and the fields returned are the ones the statute requires to be published.

How is a Turkish clinic's health-tourism authorisation recorded?

There is a Turkish regulation that names the document a clinic would hold, and it was published in the Official Gazette on 13 July 2017 under issue 30123. The regulation, as published on that date, is titled "Uluslararası Sağlık Turizmi ve Turistin Sağlığı Hakkında Yönetmelik" — the Regulation on International Health Tourism and Tourist Health — and it is issued by the Turkish Ministry of Health. We fetched the Gazette text itself rather than a commentary on it, and the sentences below are quoted from that fetched text. The Gazette is the publishing venue for Turkish secondary legislation, which makes it a primary record rather than a description of one.

The core requirement in that regulation, as published, reads: "Uluslararası sağlık turizmi kapsamında faaliyette bulunabilmek için; sağlık tesisinin ve aracı kuruluşun uluslararası sağlık turizmi yetki belgesi alması zorunludur." Our rendering into English is that an international health tourism authorisation certificate is required, and that it is required of the health facility and of the intermediary organisation. Two separate parties are named in one sentence, which means a patient dealing with an agency and a clinic is dealing with two authorisations rather than one. The regulation adds a consequence: "Yetki belgesi almayanların uluslararası sağlık turizmi faaliyetleri Bakanlıkça durdurulur."

The regulation, as published, also defines what an intermediary organisation is, and the definition is unusually concrete. It describes such a body as one authorised by the Ministry to carry out accommodation, transport and transfer services for the international health tourist and accompanying relatives, and it requires that body to be a group A travel agency holding an operating licence under the Turkish travel agencies statute. The health facility is defined separately, as an institution holding a health facility licence to which the Ministry has issued the international health tourism authorisation. The two definitions sit in the same article and describe two different kinds of organisation with two different licensing paths.

One further sentence in the regulation, as published, concerns record keeping: "Uluslararası sağlık turizmi sağlık tesisi tarafından, bu Yönetmelik kapsamında sağlık hizmeti verilen kişilerin Bakanlıkça oluşturulan web tabanlı sisteme kaydedilmesi zorunludur." Read against the GDC's question list, that sentence is relevant to the first item — who will be carrying out the treatment — because it describes a ministry-side record of people treated under the regime. It does not describe anything a patient can query, and we make no claim that it does. What it establishes is that the document being asked about has a name in law.

A freshness limit belongs in the same breath as the quotations, and it is ours, not the source's. What we fetched and quote is the version published on 13 July 2017. We tried to obtain the consolidated in-force version of that regulation and could not: the Turkish consolidated legislation service returned a shell page without article text on every attempt we logged, and the Gazette's own search endpoints returned errors. So we do not claim that the sentences above are the text currently in force. The claim we make is narrower and is the only one our evidence supports: this is what the regulation said as published on that day.

Two things follow, and one of them is a gap we are stating rather than filling. What follows positively is that a reader now has the name of a document to ask about, in the language in which it is issued, and knows that two different parties may each need one. What does not follow is any verdict about clinics in Turkey, favourable or otherwise, and we draw none: the regulation describes a licensing regime, and a licensing regime is not a quality ranking. The gap is that we have no verified public lookup endpoint for these authorisations, so we cannot yet tell a reader where to check a specific one.

How we read the Gazette text is part of the claim, because the extraction very nearly produced a false result. The Gazette page is served in a legacy Turkish character encoding, and reading it as though it were the modern default corrupts the Turkish characters and makes an exact-string search return nothing. The same page also breaks single sentences across hard line breaks, so a search for a sentence that is genuinely present returns zero matches until whitespace is normalised. Our first pass returned zero on every string for exactly those reasons; after decoding correctly and collapsing whitespace, each of the quoted strings was found once. A zero is not a finding until the tool has been shown to work.

What did the NHSBSA say about repair and replacement entitlements?

The NHS Business Services Authority publishes a knowledge base article numbered KA-02010, and its title states who it is written for: "What can I provide a patient on the NHS who has just recently returned after having dental treatment abroad?" The question is addressed to a dentist, not to a patient. Its opening answer reads: "Dealing with a patient who has been treated abroad is no different to seeing a patient who has previously received care under another contract in England or Wales." That sentence removes the destination from the analysis entirely: what matters in the article is that the earlier work was done under a different arrangement.

The consequence of that framing is stated in the article's third sentence, and it is the sentence readers of this page are most likely to be looking for: "If the original treatment was not provided by the current contract provider, 'Further treatment within 2 months', 'Free repair / replacement' and 'Regulation 11' replacement appliance will not apply." Three named entitlements are switched off, and the trigger is not the country. It is the change of provider. A patient who moved between two practices inside England falls under the same sentence as a patient who flew home from anywhere else.

The rule those entitlements come from is published on the NHS page about treatment charges, and there it appears without any exception attached. That page states: "If you have dental treatment but need further treatment within 2 months, you do not have to pay extra if the further treatment is included in the same band, or a lower band." It also states the two boundaries of the rule: "If you need further treatment in a higher band, you'll have to pay the higher band fee" and "You’ll have to pay for any further treatment after 2 months has passed." The page is written for patients and is where most readers will meet the rule.

Setting the two documents side by side gives an observation that is ours. The rule appears on a page addressed to patients with no carve-out visible on it, while the carve-out appears in a knowledge base article addressed to dentists. A reader who finds only the first page will form a reasonable but incomplete picture of what they are entitled to after work done elsewhere. We record one limitation on our own side as well: the knowledge base article carries no publication date anywhere on it, so the only date we can honestly attach to it is the date we retrieved and verified it, which is kept with our source record.

NHS England's policy document PRN00784 addresses the adjacent question of who is expected to fix the work, and it does so in one sentence: "It is expected that patients would initially seek support from their self-funded dental care provider, who should be responsible for any post-treatment clinical issues within a reasonable timeframe." The category in that sentence is "self-funded", not "abroad". The phrase "within a reasonable timeframe" is the only expression of duration in this policy, and it carries no number. It is not the only one in the corpus: the NHSBSA article quoted above carries a numbered one, "Further treatment within 2 months", and that number belongs to an NHS entitlement being switched off rather than to a period within which anyone abroad is expected to act. An expectation directed at a provider outside the United Kingdom is also not, by itself, a mechanism for making that provider act.

The same NHS England policy states a further limit that bears directly on the word replacement: "Please note that self-funded care that the NHS would not routinely fund would not usually be offered or replaced once stabilisation has been achieved." Two documents answer two different questions here, and we keep them apart rather than folding them into a third statement. On eligibility the policy speaks for itself: "Where a patient has received their care previously does not impact on their eligibility for NHS care in the future." On like-for-like replacement of privately funded work that the NHS would not routinely fund, the same policy's wording is the qualified negative quoted at the start of this paragraph. Setting those two sentences in that order is our arrangement, and neither sentence is a statement about the other.

The policy also describes what happens if a patient wants the work rebuilt rather than stabilised, and it routes that request through criteria rather than through entitlement. NHS England writes: "Should the patient request/require further reparative or reconstructive elective care, the provision of care and choice of care setting would be subject to NHS acceptance criteria with reference to the complexity of need." The document's own scope wording places privately funded care inside and outside the United Kingdom in the same category, and it does so in its own words: the note is written for "self-funded dental treatments, including privately funded non-NHS care within and outside of the UK". The NHSBSA article answers a different question and names its own trigger, also in its own words: the three entitlements do not apply where "the original treatment was not provided by the current contract provider". We set those two sentences side by side and derive no third sentence from them. The change of contract provider is the NHSBSA's term for what switches those entitlements off, and we do not restate it as anything else.

What does our own dataset show about how far apart clinics are on public review scores?

Our own dataset is a clinic-level measurement of the public review scores carried by dental clinics in Istanbul, Turkey, and the method comes before the numbers, under the rules our methodology page sets out for measurements we make ourselves. We assembled a pool of Istanbul dental clinics from a maps search for the generic clinic term, and worked from the listing records rather than from any clinic's own website. The pool contained seventy-nine unique clinics, of which seventy-seven carried a public rating, and those rated clinics carried 45,514 reviews between them. We name no clinic here. What the section reports is the shape of a distribution, and the shape is the finding.

The distribution is compressed at the top. Of the seventy-seven rated clinics, 81.8 per cent sat at 4.8 or above and 66.2 per cent sat at 4.9 or above. Twenty of them sat at exactly five stars. Five sat below 4.5, which is to say that the entire visible spread of a market of this size fits inside a fraction of the scale's range. A reader comparing two clinics on rating alone is therefore comparing positions inside a band that most of the market already occupies, and small differences inside that band are being asked to carry more weight than they can bear.

The second measurement is about whether the number of reviews behind a rating tells you anything about the rating. We calculated the Pearson correlation between the logarithm of a clinic's review count and its rating across the seventy-seven rated clinics, and it came out at 0.081. A correlation of that size means review volume accounts for effectively none of the variation in the score. That result is not an accusation about anyone's reviews, and it does not say the ratings are false. It says one specific thing: the size of the evidence base behind a public rating does not predict where that rating lands.

The extremes make the same point without any statistics. The most-reviewed clinic in our pool carried 6,709 reviews and was rated 4.9. Clinics with a handful of reviews — four in one case — carried a perfect score. On the public surface those two records look comparable, and one of them rests on several thousand independent judgements while the other rests on a number of judgements a person could count on one hand. The rating display does not distinguish them, and our measurement is that the underlying volume does not systematically pull the score in either direction.

The limits of this measurement are as important as the result, and there are four we can state precisely. A correlation is a measure of association and we assert no causal claim from it. The sample is Istanbul, drawn from a single generic maps query, and it is not a sample of Turkey. The listing data came from scraping rather than from an official places interface, and the legal position of that collection is a separate question we have not resolved and do not treat as settled. And we withhold clinic names, so nothing in this section can be turned into a ranking of specific businesses.

This pool is not the same dataset as the review-text measurement we publish elsewhere on this site, and conflating the two would be an error of exactly the kind this site exists to avoid. That other measurement covers 2,115 individual reviews across 6 clinics and counts the stars in each review one by one; this one covers clinic-level ratings across a much wider pool and never opens a review. The unit differs — a review there, a clinic here — and so does the denominator. Where a number appears in both places it is because both were measured, not because one was carried over.

The reason this measurement sits on a page about the regulator's questions is that it marks the boundary between the two kinds of information. A public rating came with no record behind it that we could request or re-verify, and our own numbers show that its most visible attribute, the volume of reviews, does not track it. The items on the GDC list are the opposite kind of thing. A registration entry, a written treatment plan, an itemised cost estimate, a complaints procedure that can be produced on request — each of those is a document or an entry that exists or does not, and each can be checked before anything is agreed.

What this page does not do

Nothing on this page is ranked and no one is recommended, under the independence rules our editorial standards page sets out. It names no clinic and no agency, the only dentist it names is the one who wrote it, at its foot, and it contains no route to book anything. We are not a clinic and not an agency, we do not sell treatment, we take no commission, and we accept no payment from any clinic. That is the reason this page can end without a recommendation: there is no arrangement anywhere behind it that a recommendation would serve. Everything above is either a quotation from a named source with its own address, a measurement of ours with its method and its limits stated next to it, or a reading of ours.

There is also a set of things the sources themselves do not say, and we measured that rather than assumed it. Across the full text of the three United Kingdom official documents cited on this page — the NHS Business Services Authority article, the NHS England policy, and the GDC patient page — no destination country is named, no NHS charge band appears, and no route to a refund or compensation from a provider outside the United Kingdom is set out. We also searched two published site maps for a page on the subject and found none: the GDC's, which lists 925 addresses, and the content site map of nhs.uk, which lists 4,100. That is a search of two site maps rather than of two websites — the nhs.uk site map index names eight child maps and we scanned one of them — and we state it that way because it is the distinction we would want stated if someone were making this claim to us. The search commands and the raw counts are kept in our working directory.

Three freshness debts on this page are open and we would rather write them down than let a reader discover them. The Turkish regulation is quoted as published on 13 July 2017 and we could not obtain the consolidated in-force version, so nothing here should be read as a statement about the text in force today. The NHS Business Services Authority article carries no publication date at all. And the GDC page about the registers contains, immediately after the sentence we quote, a route to bodies our own audit recorded as abolished — which is why we quote one sentence from it and paraphrase nothing.

One thing this page cannot yet do is close the loop it opens. It establishes that the regulation as published in the Official Gazette on 13 July 2017 named an authorisation certificate, and that as published it required one of the facility and one of the intermediary separately. We could not obtain the consolidated in-force version, so we say nothing here about what the position is today. It does not tell a reader where to verify that a particular clinic holds one, because we have not found a public lookup we could fetch, quote and re-verify to the standard we apply to every other source here. Naming a document is not the same as being able to check it, and we are not going to blur the two in order to make this page feel more complete.

One gap in how this site is run is still open, and it applies to this page as much as to any other. A named medical editor has been appointed, this page names its writer and its checker, and the sign-off behind those names is written and dated. A record of a review of this page itself now exists as well: a dated signature record on our approval line, bound by a hash to the text of the clinical passages it approves, of which this page carries three. What is still missing is the date on the page — the signature record holds it and the byline does not print it, so a reader sees who checked this page but not when. Every clinical-sounding statement on this page is either a quotation from a named regulator or health service, or a reading of ours. Our first evidence audit has been carried out. Our evidence audit page explains how claims are counted and presents the recorded results. The gap that remains is stated here rather than left to be asked about. Our corrections log is no longer empty, and it only grows: an entry is added, never rewritten and never removed.

What a reader can do with this page is check it. Every quotation above is attributed to a named publisher with a page it can be found on, and every measurement of ours names the pool, the count and the limit that applies to it. Our methodology page sets out how a claim has to travel before it appears here, our editorial standards page sets out who writes and how independence is kept, and our corrections page is where anything we get wrong will be recorded in the order it was corrected. If a sentence here cannot be traced to one of those two kinds of thing, it should not be here.

The shape of that absence has a direction, and naming the direction is more useful than naming the gap. In the corpus we scanned, the clinical side is written out in some detail: NHS England publishes where a patient may present, what stabilisation means for eligibility, and how a request for reconstructive work would be assessed. The side that is bare is the money and redress side — what repair costs, who pays for it, and how a person would recover anything from a provider outside the United Kingdom. The GDC page raises those exact questions, and it raises them as questions for the patient to put to the clinic.