Welcome to our surgery	The Practice	Services
The Team	Appointments & Emergencies	Surgery Hours
Payments & Charges	Special Needs	Orthodontics
Location	Denture Repairs	Outside Normal Hours
Location map	Links to other Dental Sites	VDP's Page

Welcome to our surgery :

Our practice extends a warm welcome to all our patients, and if you are a new patient, we would like to take this opportunity of welcoming you to this practice.
 

The dental team at this surgery takes pride in the quality of our treatment and seeks to make patient's visits as pleasant as possible. Our prime aim is to achieve good dental health for all members of the family through preventive dentistry. This means offering regular advice and helping patients understand how to care for their teeth and gums, thus reducing the need for treatment.

Comments and questions on any aspect of our practice are always welcome, and your individual needs are open to discussion at any time. Here we seek to answer some basic questions, should you need additional information please feel free to contact us.

The Practice :

All the dentists and staff of our practice believe in a friendly family type approach and will do their best to make you feel welcome at the practice and allay any fears you may have.

Home visits can be arranged for a limited range of treatments for those unable to attend the surgery. Please contact reception for further information.

It is our policy for each patient to be cared for by one dentist on a regular basis. However, if this is not possible, suitable alternative arrangements can be made for you to see someone else within the practice.

Services provided by the practice :

The practice offers a full range of dental care including:- Crown & Bridge, Veneers, Dentures, R. A. Sedation and simple Orthodontics.

If any aspect of your dental appearance concerns you, no matter how trivial it may seem, please discuss it with us.

Some forms of treatment including cosmetic dentistry, mouth guards, tooth coloured fillings in back teeth or certain crowns on back teeth are not available under the N.H.S. and you may choose to have these done privately. We are happy to discuss the options with you.

Three of our surgeries are equipped with the latest in Computerised Digital Radiography (CDR) and digital intraoral cameras. The digital radiography allows us to have the results of your x ray examination available instantly. Whilst maintaining the image quality that we are used to using normal X ray film, it requires approximately one tenth of the X ray exposure per examination. The CDR equipment and software is provided by SCHICK, and further information can be obtained from the Schick web site. Click here to go to the Schick web site.

Our practice also holds a comprehensive range of dental care products to help you with your dental care.

Meet our dental team :

We are a five man practice with a well established commitment to continuity of family dental care.

The dentists;-
Frederick C. Norman, B.D.S. (Lond.)  L.D.S., R.C.S. (Eng), qualified in 1967 from Guy's Hospital, London, and established this practice in 1975.

Kerry J. W. Tolhurst, B.D.S.(Birm.),  qualified in 1973 from Birmingham Dental Hospital and joined the practice in 1979. Kerry Tolhurst is a member of Cambridgeshire Local Dental Committee, and former chairman of the Northwest Anglia Local Dental Committee.

May F. Han, B.D.S.(Lond.) qualified in 1999 from Kings College Hospital, London, and joined the practice in 2001.

Stephen Pitchford, B.D.S.(Lond.), L.D.S.,R.C.S.(Eng.), qualified in 1986 from the Royal Dental Hospital, London,

and joined the practice in 2005.

Helen B Cronin, B.D.S.(Cork) qualified in 2006 from CorkDental Hospital, Ireland, and joined the practice in 2006

The nurses;-
 
 

Joanna Ward RDN	Elaine Cooper RDN	Louise Brenchley RDN
Mandy Coleman RDN	Kelly Lakey RDN	Joanne Richardson RDN

                Elisabete Barreiro RDN                       

Reception and Administration;-

 

Debby Chapman RDN	Justine Youngs RDN	Cindy Watson RDN
	Karen Russell

Do you have any special needs?:

Remember to tell us if you have any special needs when you make your first appointment.

Two treatment rooms are available on the ground floor. Further treatment rooms and facilities are available upstairs.

If you do have any worries or fears about visiting the dentist, we do understand. Please tell us and we will do everything we can to help.

Relative Analgesia (Happy Air) is available.

This practice looks on children as very special patients. The staff will do all they can to make visits as pleasant and worry free as possible. Our ultimate aim is to help the young develop good dental habits, which will help prevent problems in later life.

We will carry out regular examinations of your child's teeth when he or she is confident enough. This is not only to find decay but to spot problems with the arrangement of the teeth in the jaws.  Whilst we will routinely screen your child's teeth for any developing orthodontic problems the actual orthodontic treatment is becoming more and more specialized with modern techniques and materials. For this reason we do not normally undertake orthodontic treatment at this practice but will arrange for your child to be referred to a specialist orthodontist at the appropriate time.

The "right time" to arrange orthodontic  treatment varies according to dental age and the type of orthodontic problem. It helps if we know your family's teeth since family members often have similar teeth.

Does my child need a brace?

It may be obvious whether your child will need to have some teeth straightened from an early age.  It does not follow that it would be correct to treat the problem at that stage. Orthodontic problems are many and various and there are an equal number of complicated solutions to them.

Parents must resist the temptation to compare different types of orthodontic treatment for different children because there will be many reasons for choosing different treatment plans. It is certainly not true that the more crowded the teeth are, the more difficult the treatment will be. Also, in the reverse case,  apparently  minor discrepancies are often  very difficult to put right.

Who will treat my child?

There is a problem throughout the country in getting adequate National Health Service orthodontic treatment. Dentists in general practice have a varying degree of expertise in orthodontics and this will influence whether he/she is prepared to undertake a particular type of treatment. Some dentists specialize as Orthodontists, one local dentist who is a specialist orthodontist to whom we refer some of our patients is Alan Kinch. Click here to go to Alan Kinch's web page. Hospital based Orthodontic Consultants are also available to give  advice about treatment or to undertake the treatment in more difficult cases. We will take the length of any waiting list into consideration when timing a referral for advice. Some parents are choosing to have their children treated privately by Orthodontists  in order to have the treatment done at their convenience.

What factors might affect whether my child has a brace?

There are clinical reasons whether a brace might be appropriate for a child and we will explain these at the time of examination.  There are a number of other factors over which the child  has control.
 

• The child must want to have the appliance. The Orthodontist will explain the treatment and ask the child to think carefully.  It is the child who will have to wear the brace and look after it and keep visiting the Orthodontist to have it checked regularly. Our experience is that children who do not want a brace often do not complete treatment and end up with more problems than before.
• The child must clean his or her teeth thoroughly. A brace encourages food to gather around the teeth.  A child who struggles to keep his or her teeth clean without a brace will have major problems with one. Often decay can become rampant and again, the child is worse off afterwards than before,
• If the child already has some heavily filled teeth the Orthodontist may agree to do the treatment but have to modify it to remove those teeth that are less sound. Similarly, teeth that have been damaged by accident or which are lying in awkward positions may not last into adulthood.
• No matter how keen you are on having the treatment, your child must be able to attend the Orthodontist regularly. Children who move to different schools or even boarding schools often find that their treatment suffers because they cannot get to the Orthodontist as often as they need.

Appointments and Emergencies:

Appointments can be made by telephone  in person at the surgery or by E mail. Our regular times are detailed below .

In an emergency during normal surgery hours, telephone the surgery for advice and if treatment is essential, we will do our best to arrange an appointment within the next 24 hours.

Out of hours emergencies, weekends, and bank holidays are dealt with by the Cambridgeshire Emergency Dental Service;

telephone number: 01223 471798

We ask that as much notice as possible should be given if you have to cancel an appointment. A charge may have to be made if insufficient notice is given. On completion of your first course of treatment you are advised to return to the surgery for regular visits to ensure that everything is going well. Follow-up visits can be arranged before you leave the surgery. We will send you a recall letter when you next appointment is due.

Payments and charges:

After your examination, and the treatment plan has been agreed, you can be given a written estimate of the cost of the work to be done. Sometimes your original treatment plan may have to be adjusted due to unforeseen circumstances. This may affect your estimate.

The normal procedure for payment is that charges are due from the time treatment commences, so please be prepared to pay when asked to do so.
If you are being treated under the NHS you may qualify for full or partial exemption from N.H.S. charges. Please contact our reception for up to date details of exemptions from NHS charges.

If you are worried about the cost of dental treatment or find any point about charges difficult to understand, please ask for an explanation.

In addition to cash and cheques, we are pleased to accept payment by Visa, Mastercard, and Switch.

Normal surgery hours:

Monday to Friday 9.00am to 5.00pm.

Some appointments may be possible outside these hours by prior arrangement

Surgery location:

The practice is ideally situated only a few yards from St Peter's town centre car park, and opposite the W.I. Hall.

For a detailed location map of the practice, please click here .

We offer an efficient denture repair service.

In the case of an acute emergency, when the practice is closed, registered patients of this practice should telephone:

In case of severe trauma or severe bleeding, then please go to the casualty department at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Kings Lynn.

Out of hours emergencies, weekends, and bank holidays are dealt with by the Cambridgeshire Emergency Dental Service;

telephone number: 01223 471798

Special arrangements are made for bank holidays and these details will be given as necessary.

 

Dentanet	General Dental Council	British Dental Association
Dental Health Foundation	Derweb	Word of Mouth
Dental Practice Board	Cambridgeshire Health Authority	Dental Guide