Dental practices in England should already be familiar with the updates to NHS Urgent Care Targets, which came into effect in April 2026. What they may not realise, however, is the important role call-handling plays in meeting targets. Because if you can’t track whether urgent calls are reaching your front desk, you cannot measure delivery.
With a reminder that these updates apply to NHS practices in England only, this guide explains what has changed, why it makes patient calls more important, and how Dentsy AI phone system can help keep your practice on target.
What changed in April 2026?
Although the focus of this blog is on the call-handling aspect of patient delivery, a quick recap of the changes to NHS Urgent Care illustrates how much is at stake.
From 1.2 UDAs to £75 per course of treatment
Until April, an urgent course of treatment earned 1.2 UDAs. It is now worth £75.
For contracts with a required number of urgent treatments, the £75 is split in two:
• £15 fixed credit for each urgent treatment in your required number, paid monthly in equal parts
• £60 activity credit each time you submit a Band 1 urgent FP17
The 8.2% requirement
If your contract is for 100 or more UDAs, 8.2% of your relevant contract value must now go on urgent and unscheduled care. That works out at 11 urgent courses of treatment for every £10,000.
What counts as urgent care
Although the official guidance uses the term “unscheduled care”, it covers emergency, urgent and non-urgent needs that require clinical care within 60 minutes, 24 hours or 7 days. Whether a patient’s need falls into one of these is a clinical decision, made through triage by your dental team.
It should be easy for patients to find
Your patient information leaflet and website should clearly explain how to get an urgent appointment. You must use all available capacity for patients who contact you directly or are referred by helplines such as NHS 111. Furthermore, any patient with an urgent need is eligible, whether or not they’re registered with you.
Why urgent demand is now something to monitor
Urgent care delivery is assessed at two checkpoints during the year, separately from the rest of your contract.
1 April to 30 September: has the practice delivered at least 30% of its required number?
31 March: has it delivered at least 96%?
If you fall below 96% at year end, the £60 activity payments linked to the urgent treatments you didn’t deliver can be recovered, and your commissioner may issue a breach notice. The £15 fixed credits are not recovered if you fall short.
Consequently, the risk sits with the activity payments, which depend on urgent courses of treatment actually being completed and claimed.
The Key Takeaway
Every urgent-need patient who can’t get through, or gets through but isn’t booked, is a course of treatment that doesn’t count towards your number.
Practices might not have any control over the number of patients seeking urgent care, but they are absolutely in control of how much demand reaches the appointment book. And that journey begins with a phone call.
Three ways urgent enquiries slip away
What follows are not failures by the people at the front desk. They’re weaknesses in the system that can be easily fixed with the right AI phone system.
1. Missed calls nobody follows up
Patients in pain rarely leave a voicemail. If the line is busy, most will ring the next practice or call NHS 111. All that the practice sees is a missed call, with no context. It could be a sales call, a regular booking, or an emergency. The call log provides no clue.
The fix
Dentsy’s AI receptionist ensures that every call is answered, whether it’s out of hours or during busy periods. Where the dental practice doesn’t have the AI receptionist enabled, Dentsy’s AI phone system assigns the missed call to a next step action, tagging the relevant person to follow up. For returning customers, that action will be accompanied by the patient details pulled from the PMS. As a result, no patient is left waiting for a reply.
2. Answered calls with no record of why the patient called
Vital context can disappear when urgent cases are managed between handovers. A receptionist might take a call about an urgent filling, for example, and offer the next available slot. However, the receptionist picking up that booking may have no supporting information to reference. Multiply the scenario by hundreds of patients during the week and lapses are almost certain to happen.
The fix
Dentsy AI phone system automatically records and posts a summary of each call, so the PMS is updated with why a patient called and what the next step will be. More importantly in terms of NHS Urgent Care targets, there’s an easy-to-consult view of which calls were tagged using categories linked to urgent care, eg ‘pain’, ‘swelling’ or ‘broken tooth’. Managers can see at a glance whether call volumes are in line with targets.
3. No record of what happened next
The call may be logged, but what about the outcome? Was the patient booked in, and did they attend? Each outcome reveals the processes that need improvement. A patient who didn’t attend points to a reminder problem. A patient sent elsewhere because the book was full points to a capacity problem. You can only fix the one you can see.
A quick audit for your practice
Could you find the answers at short notice to these questions for the last month?
How many calls about pain, swelling or dental emergencies reached you?
If you don’t have the data readily to hand, create a shortlist of the most common reasons for emergency calls and set up tags within your CRM or PMS. It’s easy to do with Dentsy and it means you have a clear picture of call volumes by request.
How many became a booked urgent appointment, and how many attended?
Compare your call notes with your appointment book. The gap between enquiries and attended appointments shows where patients are dropping out.
How many calls did you miss, and were they returned?
Check your phone system’s missed call log for the same period. Look at when the misses happen. Opening time, lunch cover and staff training sessions are common pinch points.
Are you on track for 96% by 31 March?
If you’re behind, the questions above will help show whether the cause is low demand, missed calls or limited capacity.
Visibility first, then capacity
The urgent care requirement is still relatively new, but it puts a number on something practices have always done. To keep up to speed, dental clinics need to know whether patients with urgent needs were able to reach a receptionist, and what happened when they tried.
Much of this comes down to knowing what reaches your phones. Some practices track it by hand, the least desirable option. Others use a phone system that logs every call, including missed ones, and records what each call was about and what happened next.
Dentsy’s AI Phone System goes even further. Because it integrates seamlessly with your existing PMS, it updates records automatically, so practice managers can see patterns in pain and emergency enquiries without piecing them together from notes.
Want to see how Dentsy’s call tracking and outcome reporting work?
