A City Dental Care analysis
Seeing a dentist after work
When we wrote to patients we had not seen in years, more than half of them opened the message and clicked between three in the afternoon and nine at night. A practice that closes at five is shut for most of that.
Dentistry has an access problem that gets discussed almost entirely in terms of capacity: how many patients a practice can take, how many NHS places exist. Far less is said about the hours those places are available. A place on a list is only worth having if you can reach it without taking time off, and for a great many people that is the part that fails.
We have some evidence of our own on this. In September we wrote to our NHS-registered patients who had not been seen for two years or more, and watched what they did with it. It was a small exercise over ten days, so it is an observation rather than a finding, but the pattern was clear enough to be worth putting in public.
When people actually got round to it
Share of clicks on our recall, by the hour they arrived.
Ten days of one recall on one Edinburgh list. An observation, not a result. We have not drawn an hour-by-hour curve, because the one timing figure we measured is the share falling inside that window.
Three in the afternoon to nine at night is the shape of an ordinary working day ending. It is the commute, the hour after tea, the point where somebody finally deals with the thing they have been putting off. A practice whose phone stops being answered at five is unreachable for most of that window, and the thought goes nowhere.
And how they chose to do it
Of the lapsed patients who responded to the recall.
Given the choice, people avoided ringing. Reception time was not the constraint on getting these patients back in - the opening hours and the booking route were.
That second chart matters as much as the first. If most people would rather book than phone, then a practice can be open late and still be unreachable, because getting in depends on a receptionist who has gone home. Evening hours and round-the-clock online booking are two halves of the same thing.
Why this is worth saying
Nationally, Public Health Scotland put registration at an estimated 95.1% of the population at 31 March 2026, while only 62.1% of registered patients had been seen within the previous two years. That leaves close to two million people in Scotland who have a dentist on paper and have not been near them. We looked at that gap in detail in our analysis of the access figures, and the conclusion there was that a register cannot shrink through inactivity, so the number tells you very little about who is actually being looked after.
None of that is caused by opening hours alone. But if more than half of the people who think about coming back do their thinking after three in the afternoon, then the hours a practice keeps are part of the access question and not merely a convenience.
What to look for in an evening appointment
If you are trying to see a dentist without taking time off, these are the things worth checking before you register anywhere.
- How late is the last appointment, not the last phone call? Some practices answer the phone until six but stop treating at four.
- Can you book without ringing? If booking depends on somebody picking up, an evening slot you cannot arrange in the evening is of limited use.
- Are the late slots NHS as well as private? Ask directly. Evening availability restricted to private appointments is a different offer.
- What happens in an emergency after hours? A practice should be able to tell you plainly what to do at 9pm on a Sunday.
How we do it here
We are open until 8pm Monday to Thursday and until 5pm on Friday, at 9 Earl Grey Street in central Edinburgh. Those late appointments are available whether you are seen on the NHS or as a private patient, and the fee does not change because of the hour. Our NHS list is open, so a first NHS examination can be booked without a waiting list, and NHS examinations are free for everyone in Scotland.
Booking runs online around the clock, so the eleven o’clock decision to finally do something about a tooth does not have to survive until morning. If something has gone wrong and it will not wait, our emergency dental care page sets out what to do now and how same-day appointments work.
Book an evening appointment
Open until 8pm Monday to Thursday. Online booking is available at any hour.
National figures are from Public Health Scotland’s NHS dental data monitoring report for the quarter ending 31 March 2026, published 26 May 2026; PHS lists its next release for November 2026. The practice’s own figures come from ten days of a single recall to lapsed NHS patients in September 2026 and are given as proportions only, with no patient numbers published. Written by Dr Hamza Al Haddad, Director, City Dental Care, Edinburgh.
