Registration withdrawals - updated 1 February 2012

01 February 2012

A letter was sent to all dental practices, with the November paid December 2011 payment schedules, advising we would be withdrawing the registrations for patients identified as deceased, embarked or having a duplicate registration.

We have withdrawn the duplicate registrations and these were reported in your December 2011 paid January 2012 schedule. We will now carry out this process on a monthly basis.

Where we identify duplicate registrations, the registration created most recently is judged to be valid.  Payment will continue for this registration only and will cease for all other active registrations for that patient.

An automated process to withdraw registrations for deceased and embarked patients on a daily basis has now been switched on. This uses a file from the Community Health Index (CHI) that will interact with our payment system to automatically remove these patient registrations. The withdrawn patients will be reported on your monthly payment schedule.

If you disagree with any of the registrations we have withdrawn, you must complete a Dental 289 form, giving full details of why you believe we should not have withdrawn the registration. We will investigate and if it is found we have withdrawn the patient incorrectly, the registration will be reinstated and any payment backdated.

We have put together a question and answer section which addresses the most frequently asked questions relating to this issue.

Questions & Answers

Q1. What are you doing if you have found patients registered with me who are deceased, embarked or are duplicate registrations?

Q2. When will I be notified of the patients that have been identified as deceased, embarked or duplicate and for whom payments have stopped?

Q3. What action do I need to take at the moment?

Q4. What are the reasons for duplicate registrations?

Q5. Why do most of the records reported on my schedule now have a Community Health Index (CHI) number attached, when they never have before?

Q6. Is the Community Health Index (CHI) information accurate?

Q7. Will you be recovering any of the registration payments made to me for duplicate registrations?

Q8. How will you ensure this does not continue to happen in the future?

A1. We have withdrawn the duplicate registrations and registration payments have ceased for these patients from 1 December 2011. We will now carry out this process on a monthly basis.

We switched on the automated process for withdrawing deceased and embarked registrations on 27 January 2012. This will withdraw registrations for these patients on a daily basis.
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A2. You will be notified of all patients for whom registrations have been withdrawn and payment stopped, in your monthly payment schedule.

These withdrawals will be reported in your schedule with the following reasons:

- ‘Identified as duplicate’
- ‘Withdrawn – Deceased’
- ‘Withdrawn – Moved outside UK ’
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A3. When you receive your schedule, you should check the patients we have withdrawn to make sure you agree. If you do not agree with any of the registrations we have withdrawn you should complete a Dental 289 form. This can be posted to us at the following address:

Customer Administration, Dental and Ophthalmic, Gyle Square,
1 South Gyle Crescent, Edinburgh, EH12 9EB

Alternatively, you can submit the Dental 289 form to nss.psd-customer-admin@nhs.net from your personal NHSmail account. We will then investigate the withdrawal and if it is found we have withdrawn the registration inappropriately, we will reinstate the registration and payment will be backdated.
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A4. Duplicate registrations can be caused by a number of factors, including:

- Different patient details being provided by dentists;
- Matching errors between patient details in our payments system, Midas, and the Community Health Index (CHI);
- Errors made during processing or through patient matching in Midas.
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A5. We carried out a CHI matching exercise, where we matched the records we hold in our payments system, Midas, with the CHI database. There are now around 95% of active records in Midas with a CHI number attached.
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A6. We carried out a detailed analysis of a sample of registration records for patients, to determine the accuracy. The results show that the CHI match is approximately 99% accurate.
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A7. We have completed the majority of high level work to identify and calculate potential overpayments. A decision on the next steps is awaited from the Scottish Government. We will keep you updated with all future developments regarding this.
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A8. We are currently discussing strategies with the Scottish Government Health Directorates, British Dental Association and Scottish Dental Practice Committee to prevent a recurrence of this issue.
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