How do the NHS England April 1st changes work in Dentally?
🚨 Important: The information in this article is in accordance with NHS guidance - the rest of our Help Centre will be updated in due course. For more details of the changes and the most up-to-date information, please refer to the NHS directly.
From April 1st 2026, Dentally automatically updated to support the changes coming to NHS England - including capturing patient ethnicity under the new guidelines.
Suitably qualified nurses will now be able to submit NHS claims for Fluoride Varnish (on patients under 16).
If you wish for your nurses to be able to submit claims, you will need to set them up as practitioners, as you would with a dentist or hygienists.
This allows you to assign them to appointments in the calendar, ensures they can chart, and enables them to make claims for treatments they have carried out.
They must have their own NHS credentials in order to claim, which should be provided by the NHS.
They should then chart the same fluoride varnish code as any other clinician would use - as long as the nurse is the one who charts it, this will be picked up, and correct UDAs assigned accordingly, when it is submitted.
The NHS expects you to ask patients for their ethnicity.
You can select 'Ethnicity Not Stated' or 'Patient Ethnicity Unknown' from the dropdown if not provided by the patient.
Two new ethnicity options have now been added. Giving your patients the option to choose a different ethnicity, even if they provided one before, will allow you to be compliant with the NHS guidance that you should not simply reuse patients' existing stored ethnicity (given new options are available which weren't before).
You can also (optionally) provide NHS number for all patients in the 'Details' tab, or indicate a reason for the number being absent.
If the patient doesn't provide an NHS number, click the 'NHS number not provided' tick box.
When this box is ticked, a field will appear asking you to provide the reason for the missing NHS number.
If you provide the ethnicity/reason for absence here, it will be included in any claims submitted for that patient. If you don't provide it in the 'Details' tab, it won't be included in the claim.
The Urgent UDA Band is being replaced with the concept of Unscheduled Care. While similar, it will pay a fixed monetary amount by awarding the equivalent number of UDAs according to your notional UDA value.
You will need to mark treatment plans as Unscheduled Care.
In the event that the patient didn't attend, unscheduled care appointments are split into a £60 activity-based credit, and £15 fixed credit per appointment. Only the activity-based credit is claimable; it is our understanding that the NHS is crediting the £15 monthly to the contracts based on the agreed number of appointment slots, and thus there is no need to submit an additional claim.
When you chart fissure sealants, it will now generate a Band 2 claim automatically, rather than a Band 1. Pre-formed crowns on teeth will also now contribute to the sub-band calculation for Band 2 claims.
The NHS is now differentiating between two different types of denture repairs (Reline/Rebase and Addition). We've automatically added these two new treatments, and we've marked any treatments using the old NHS Category as inactive.