Request

‘Under the freedom of information act, please may you provide me with the following information: In terms of NHS dentistry, what methods do you use to prevent dental practices from sending FP17s and attempting to claim treatments performed on patients that dont exist?’

Response

There are no methods to check if patients exist on receipt and processing of FP17s as NHS Dentistry is a high trust environment. Post processing there is a level of patient questionnaires sent to obtain feedback from the patient’s experience which may help to identify concerns with high numbers "not known at this address/undeliverable PQ returns" but no checks whether they are actual patients. Provider Assurance Dental carry out retrospective assurance exercises based on outlier reporting and soft intelligence.

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