Handing back the contract takes a meeting. Telling two thousand patients takes far more thought, and most practices get about six weeks to do it.
The Bigger Brand is a Manchester-based dental marketing agency that supports practices across the UK moving from NHS to private. The work covers patient communication planning, membership plan positioning and promotion, the website and fee transparency, retention campaigns for existing patients, and new patient campaigns to replace departing registrations. Support usually runs in phases across the months before, during and after the conversion.
Most practices plan a conversion as a contract and finance project. The accountant models the numbers, the principal chooses a plan provider, and the patient side gets a letter written in the final fortnight. Yet everything the practice earns afterwards depends on patients deciding, one by one, that it’s still worth coming.
That decision is shaped by what they hear, who they hear it from and how easily they can find answers. Handle it well and the change feels planned rather than sudden. It also starts the flow of new private patients the practice will rely on for years.
It’s worth saying at the start, because the anxiety around this is enormous and usually misplaced.
You will lose patients. Every practice that converts does. The real question is which ones you need to keep, and how to make sure the ones who go don’t leave angry.
A patient who comes in once every three years for a free check-up and has never accepted a treatment plan isn’t really revenue. They’re a diary slot and a recall letter.
The ones who matter are the people who’ve been quietly paying privately for years anyway, along with anyone who’s been putting treatment off, and anyone who’d happily pay for a proper appointment if they were offered one.
Those patients mostly stay, provided they hear it from you first and understand what they’re getting.
The ones who leave badly almost always found out from a letter that read like a legal notice or, worse, from someone else in the village.
The instinct is to apologise, or to blame the government. Both are mistakes.
Apologising invites the patient to feel wronged. Blaming reads as an excuse, even when it’s entirely true, and patients have heard it from enough practices to have stopped listening.
What works is plain and forward-looking: what’s changing, when it happens and what it costs. Then what they get that they didn’t before, which is usually longer appointments, more continuity and the ability to actually book.
The membership plan does most of the heavy lifting, because it turns an alarming, open-ended prospect into a fixed monthly figure. For a lot of patients, £30 a month with check-ups and hygiene included is far less frightening than the NHS band charges they were never quite sure about.
Months two to five after conversion are usually the hardest, and almost nobody budgets for them.
Some patients have gone. The new private ones haven’t arrived yet, because finding new patients takes longer than losing old ones. The diary looks worrying, and this is the point where principals start panicking and discounting.
Two things prevent it.
First, start bringing in new patients before the conversion, not after. The pipeline needs to be full already when the departures happen.
Second, work the existing list hard. That means everyone who stayed but hasn’t booked, everyone with an outstanding treatment plan, and everyone who left and might come back once they’ve tried to find an NHS dentist and discovered there isn’t one.
That last group is larger than most practices expect, and almost nobody goes back to ask.
Getting the sequence right matters as much as the message itself.
All of them, including reception and nurses, before a single patient hears a word. They’ll be answering the questions, so they need the answers, the tone and permission to say “I don’t know, let me find out”. A team told at the same time as the patients will handle it badly, and it won’t be their fault.
No announcement until the numbers exist. “We’re going private, details to follow” creates six weeks of speculation, and everyone assumes the worst.
Tell them personally, ideally through the clinician who treats them. People in the middle of treatment, or with a history of accepting plans, shouldn’t find out by post.
A letter and email with the plan, the fees and a clear invitation to talk. Same message, same week.
Fees published, plan explained, and an FAQ answering every question your team is about to be asked forty times.
Only once existing patients have been looked after. Advertising for new private patients while your own list is still confused is how a conversion goes wrong in public.
Tell us your timeline and your patient numbers. We’ll map out the communications, the membership plan launch and the new patient campaign, month by month.
It varies a lot with location, fee levels, how the change is communicated and local NHS availability. Practices in areas with few NHS alternatives usually keep a higher proportion. Retention is generally strongest among patients with a history of accepting private treatment, and lowest among those who only come in occasionally for routine check-ups.
Brief the whole practice team first, finalise fees and any membership plan before announcing anything, and tell higher-value and in-treatment patients personally before the general letter goes out. Written communication should say what’s changing, when, what it costs and what patients get, with clear ways to ask questions.
A dental membership plan is a monthly subscription covering routine check-ups and hygiene appointments, often with discounts on further treatment. During a conversion, a plan gives patients a fixed, predictable monthly cost instead of open-ended private fees, which usually improves retention. Plans are commonly run through providers such as Denplan, or in-house.
Before the conversion, ideally, because patients leave faster than new ones arrive. Practices that only start advertising once the conversion is complete often face a revenue gap in the months that follow. Reactivating existing patients and following up treatment plans usually bring faster returns than new patient advertising during this period.
