GIRFT has added a guidance document focusing on special care dentistry (SCD) to its collection helping to standardise and improve outpatient coding across key hospital dentistry specialties.
Co-badged by the British Society of Gerodontology and the British Society of Special Care Dentistry, the new guidance aims to support NHS teams to better capture consistent and accurate coded data for special care dental interventions, which in turn can be used for more meaningful comparison of activity across outpatient, day case and inpatient settings.
The guidance delivers on a recommendation in GIRFT’s national report for hospital dentistry (2021), which highlighted how poorly defined treatment codes made it difficult to identify variation in clinical outcomes. For example, the main speciality code for SCD exists (451) but is often not applied. Work carried out by special care dentists is often not only attributed to the wrong clinician but also the wrong specialty, misrepresenting the amount of SCD provision both delivered and required across the country.
The guidance for SCD coding joins GIRFT’s collection of hospital dentistry coding guides, which were recently updated to reflect new codes available in OPCS-4.11 from April 2026.
The five guides can be accessed on the links below:
These guidance documents should be used by dentists and others involved with capturing OPCS-4 procedure codes for dental procedures in an outpatient setting, with the aim that the improved data will input into care quality metrics, support service design and visibility of activity, help understand rates of specialised care, and support future commissioning.
