Dental Practice Guide
Emergency Dental Care - Practice Guide
This Practice Guide is intended for use by dental staff directly involved in responding to emergency calls within a dental practice setting.
The Practice Guide is also available as a downloadable PDF.
While the Management of Acute Dental Problems guidance is intended for use by staff in any healthcare setting who may be asked to advise or manage patients with acute dental problems, including non-dental professionals such as general medical practice, emergency department and pharmacy staff, this Practice Guide is aimed primarily at dental staff in a practice setting.
The Practice Guide includes:
- information about the three categories of unscheduled care: emergency, urgent and non-urgent
- a simple method for prioritising emergency calls from patients to one of the three categories of care according to the assessed need of the patient
- advice on providing patients with self care instructions for managing pain, dental trauma and post-extraction bleeding
This Practice Guide provides a simple method for use by dental practice teams, which might include non-clinical reception staff, to prioritise unscheduled dental care. Non-clinical staff should seek advice from a clinical colleague if unsure about any aspect of patient triage or advice. Note that the guide is not comprehensive but deals with common presenting conditions.
Dental practices need to conduct a basic form of triage on a daily basis in response to telephone calls from patients requesting emergency appointments. The term triage describes the process of sorting patients into groups based on their need for or likely benefit from immediate treatment. Telephone triage is an important element in the handling of emergency contacts. Not only can it identify those patients who are the highest priority, but the telephone contact itself provides an opportunity to reassure the patient and give advice.
This Practice Guide for prioritising dental emergencies is based on the first edition of the Practice Guide that accompanied the SDCEP Emergency Dental Care (EDC) guidance. The full version of the EDC guidance, which was published in 2007, provided quality standards that specified the requirements of out-of-hours emergency dental services. As services have developed further since publication of the full guidance, this historic, strategy document is now archived.
This second edition of the Practice Guide, which provides support for prioritising dental emergencies in a practice setting, has been updated to include information on the categories of care and to reflect the advice provided in the second edition of the SDCEP Management of Acute Dental Problems (MADP) guidance, published in 2026. The updated Practice Guide was reviewed by members of the Guidance Development Group for the MADP guidance and dental team members with experience of dental triage.
The full SDCEP Management of Acute Dental Problems guidance provides more detailed decision support and advice about the initial management and subsequent care for a wide range of conditions that may present as acute dental problems.
The advice presented in this Practice Guide does not override the individual responsibility of the health professional to make decisions appropriate to the individual patient. However, it is advised that significant departures from this advice are fully documented.