Member Article

Local dental practice all smiles after massive growth injection

An award-winning local dental practice has many reasons to smile after making several huge investments to bolster its growth.

Middleton-St-George Dental Care, near Darlington, has acquired around 500 new patients after the retirement of a nearby colleague, taken delivery of a £30,000 award-winning dental scanner and seen its owner graduate from a world-famous education and training centre in the USA – all in the last nine months.

Principal dental surgeon and owner of the practice, Chris Burton, is one of a handful of UK dentists to graduate from the Kois Centre after completing the intense nine-module curriculum in Seattle, Washington.

The news comes just weeks after Chris invested in the Trios intra-oral scanner, and increased his client numbers to 5,000, by taking on the patients of dental implant specialist, Simon Allum, in nearby Hurworth-on-Tees.

Chris said: “We were proud and honoured to be able to purchase the goodwill of such an esteemed colleague. Simon’s practice was purely dental implants, so it has increased the amount of this treatment we undertake.”

The new scanner also helps Chris with his implant work, among other things. He explained: “It takes multiple 3D colour photographs of the teeth and stitches them all together to produce a 3D model on a dedicated laptop computer. The idea is that you can use the model in place of traditional dental impressions for crowns, bridges, implants, dentures etc.

“It’s much faster than traditional impressions – three minutes for a full mouth scan compared to 10 or 15 minutes for impressions. It’s more efficient, more comfortable for patients and reduces the number of visits required for treatment. It also gives us a way to precisely monitor whether your teeth are wearing down. The software will be able to overlay successive scans, so if you have active tooth wear, we’ll know and will be able to do something about it.”

These latest investments took place while Chris was travelling to and from Seattle to learn the latest advances in aesthetics, implants and restorative dentistry, as part of the advanced postgraduate curriculum at the prestigious Kois Centre.

Chris, who took five separate trips to the USA between last October and May this year for the course, said: “There is nowhere like Kois in the world. It has an amazing reputation, and as the best dentists I know have done the course, it made sense for me to do it also: my aim is to become the best dentist I can possibly be!

“Perhaps most importantly, the Kois Centre is independent and not sponsored by any medical, dental or pharmaceutical companies. This means its analysis of scientific research is completely objective, and we are 100 per cent up to date with the latest procedures and innovations as a result of this period of development.

“Everything they teach at the Kois Centre is completely evidence-based, giving me reassurance we are practising the latest techniques based on sound scientific research. This means we can now offer more advanced and complex dentistry, including new options for dental implants.”

Modules on the intense course, which included both academic and hands-on training, cover all clinical areas of dentistry, including gums, teeth, bite problems, cosmetics and implants. Chris now hopes to deliver an even broader range of options to his patients, as well as helping to transform the award-winning practice.

The patient-focused dental practice provides a range of services including routine and cosmetic dentistry, invisible braces, dental implants and teeth whitening. For more information, please visit: http://www.msgdental.co.uk/

Twitter: @MSGDental

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Harvey and Hugo .