New director for not-for-profit Trafalgar Dental Services
February 18th 2010
A pioneering service providing much-needed NHS dentistry to 47,000 patients in Hampshire has a new director.
Samantha Smith (pictured right) has been appointed Director of Dentistry at Trafalgar Dental Services, which has clinics at Holbury in the New Forest, Gosport, Portsmouth
and Southampton.
Trafalgar set a national trend by offering much-needed NHS dentistry in areas where no NHS dentists were available or where there were long waiting lists.
It is contracted by NHS Hampshire and Portsmouth and Southampton PCTs to provide dental services for the NHS. As a not-for-profit organisation, it supplements its income by offering dentistry to private patients as well.
Trafalgar is part of SCA Group, a social enterprise health and social care provider that aims to deliver high quality services to local communities. As a social enterprise, SCA reinvests all its surpluses into improving services for clients.
Samantha, who lives in New Milton, said she was delighted to take up her new appointment at such an exciting time for Trafalgar Dentistry.
"Trafalgar Dentistry is going from strength to strength and we have a new purpose-built laboratory servicing our practices. We always aim to provide high standards of clinical governance and staff training and we now have a new specialist Dental Board to oversee our work," she said.
"Our aim is to meet all our targets and to provide the best possible service for all our patients. We also hope to be able to share our expertise with other providers around the country so that more patients can have access to NHS dentistry through the social enterprise route.
"All of our practices have now passed their three-yearly PCT inspection, apart from one that has not yet been open for three years, so we are very pleased to be given this recognition and endorsement.
"The next stage of our development will be to work towards being accepted on to the British Dental Association Best Practice Scheme. This is a quality assurance process which recognises outstanding practices."
Trafalgar employs 14 dentists, 14 dental nurses, 11 receptionists, five practice managers, one dental services manager and one clinical governance officer, as well as a director, two laboratory technicians and one laboratory assistant.