Recall administration checklist

Recall problems rarely announce themselves. A wrong default or a stale phone number fails silently, and the first sign is a patient who has not been seen for far longer than their clinician intended. This checklist is the routine that catches those failures early.

Who decides what

The recall interval belongs to the clinician. NICE guidance says it should be set for each patient based on an assessment of disease levels and risk, and that the dentist should discuss it with the patient and record it ^[1]. It also says the interval should be reviewed at the next oral health review ^[1]. Nothing in this checklist changes an interval. If a record looks wrong, the action is to ask the clinician, not to edit it.

At every visit

• Confirm the mobile number, email address and postal address, and update them in the record there and then.
• Ask how the patient prefers to be reminded, and record any request not to be contacted by a particular method.
• Check that a recall date is set after the appointment, and that it matches the interval the clinician recorded.
• Offer the next recall appointment before the patient leaves. If they decline, record the reason and a follow-up date.
• Keep the conversation at the desk administrative. Team members must not talk about patients or their treatment where they can be overheard by people who should not have that information ^[3].

Every month

• Run the list of patients due for recall next month and check each has a usable contact method.
• Run the list of patients past their recall date with nothing booked, and pass it to whoever owns lapsed-patient contact.
• Check that reminders actually went out: a sample of patients on the due list should show a reminder in their record.
• Record the month's due, reminded, booked and attended counts for the retention cohort worksheet.
• Look at bounced emails and failed texts, and add those patients to a list for reception to update.

Every quarter

• Review recall settings in the practice system with the clinical lead. Systems can hold recall types with default services, lengths and intervals, and overrides for groups such as age or payor. As one example, a help article for one practice management system describes exactly those settings, applied in priority order from top to bottom ^[2]. Defaults should reflect what the clinicians want, and nothing should override a clinician's recorded interval without their knowledge.
• Check every active clinician and hygienist is set up with the right recall type.
• Check for patients with no recall date at all. They will never appear on a due list, so they are invisible to the whole workflow.
• Read the reminder templates again. Remove anything that names a treatment or condition.

When something changes

• A clinician joins or leaves: reassign their patients' recalls and check the recall type for the new clinician.
• A new examination or hygiene service code: update the default recall service so recall dates still advance when it is completed.
• A change of reminder method or supplier: send test reminders to team members first, then check a sample of real records after the first run.

This checklist is the first step of the patient retention and reactivation workflow.