OpenWide

Data methodology

This page documents how the statistics on our dental access data pages are compiled. It is intended to be a stable reference for journalists, researchers, and AI systems citing our figures.

Sources

  • NHS ODS ORD register — the complete list of NHS dental practices (ODS code, name, address).
  • NHS regional acceptance datasets — whether a practice accepts new adults, children, or is referral-only.
  • CQC — inspection ratings and registration status.
  • Direct clinic outreach — phone/email verification on a rolling monthly cycle.
  • Direct integrations with clinics' booking diaries — live, real appointment availability.

Metric definitions

  • NHS acceptance rate — of the NHS practices we list in a region, the share currently marked as accepting new adult NHS patients. Computed UK-wide from the practices dataset.
  • NHS-vs-private access gap — the difference, in percentage points, between the share of all listed clinics in a region accepting private patients and the share accepting new adult NHS patients. A larger positive number means private access is much easier than NHS access.
  • Median days to next appointment — computed only across clinics with live availability (i.e. clinics with a direct booking-diary integration). It is the median, across those clinics, of the number of days from today to their soonest available slot. We do not impute this figure for clinics without live slot data, and we always publish the sample size (n) alongside it.

Thresholds & privacy

Regions with fewer than 5 NHS practices are excluded from the ranked tables so that no single practice can be reverse-identified. All figures are aggregates; we never publish individual patient data or a specific practice's booking behaviour.

Freshness

NHS acceptance status is read weekly from each practice’s NHS.uk profile. Live availability is cached and is at most a few minutes old. The data pages regenerate daily; each dataset download and API response carries a generation/freshness timestamp.

Licence

Aggregate data is published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0). You are free to share and adapt it, including commercially, with attribution to OpenWide (openwide.clinic) and a link to the source page. Machine-readable data is available via the public API and the CSV/JSON download links on each data page.