24 July 2025

In 2025, the GP Patient Survey was sent to 2.72 million randomly selected patients aged 16 or over who were registered with a GP practice in England. Responses were received from 702,837 individuals which is slight numerical increase on 2024, but at 25.8% is a lower response rate than last year. 

The survey was available for completion between January and March 2025.  

Although the survey primarily relates to respondents’ experiences of general practice it also includes a few questions about NHS dental and pharmacy services. This supplementary analysis provides more detail on the dental questions than is provided in the main survey results which are available from https://gp-patient.co.uk/surveysandreports. 

In 2024, the survey changed, which means it is not appropriate to make comparisons with results from previous years.

This year, we have expanded the scope of this report to include greater detail on the economic activity of survey respondents and produced some new analysis on deprivation and rurality. 

We have also implemented some methodological changes which are explained in detail in the accompanying report. In summary, these include: 

• Adding a new category of “no for multiple reasons” where respondents choose more than one reason for being unable to get an NHS dental appointment, which resolves an issue of double-counting 

• Excluding those who said they could not remember whether they managed to get an appontment from the denominator when calculating the percentage able to get an NHS dental appointment  

As a result of the methodological changes and the new measures, the 2024 analysis has been reissued. However, care should be taken when comparing 2024 and 2025 results as there are not yet enough years’ data to enable us to identify any trends in the data. 

 Key findings

Results are reported at overall England, national and ICS level. Note that these geographical breakdowns apply to the locations of general practices rather than dental practices or the addresses of the survey respondents. 

We have expanded the scope of the analysis this year and reissued 2024 tables to allow for some comparison with the previous year.

• 78% of the 2025 survey respondents who had tried to get an appointment with an NHS dentist were successful, which is a two percentage point increase on the 2024 success rate.
  
• Respondents living in the South West were considerably less likely to manage to get an NHS dental appointment than respondents in other regions and in three of the region’s ICSs, fewer than two thirds of respondents who tried to get an appointment were successful.
  
• Retired respondents and those in full-time education were the most likely to get an NHS dental appointment (84% and 85% respectively) while less than three quarters of respondents who were unemployed or unable to work due to sickness or ill-health managed to do so.
  
  
• Respondents living in the least deprived areas were more likely to manage to get an NHS dental appointment than respondents in the most deprived areas and when considered alongside rurality, it is evident that respondents living in deprived rural areas tend to struggle to access NHS dental services. 

• Almost 60% of survey respondents had not tried to get an NHS dental appointment within the previous two years. The reasons they had not tried varied depending on whether the respondent had tried to access NHS dental services more than two years ago or whether they had never tried to get an NHS appointment. Overall, a quarter of respondents who had not tried to get an NHS dental appointment said the reason was that they thought they would be unable to so, while less than a fifth said they had not tried because they had not needed an appointment. 

• 87% of respondents who managed to get an NHS dental appointment described their experience as fairly or very good compared to 16% who were unable to get an appointment. 

GP Patient Survey, Supplementary Dental Analysis, January to March 2025

GP-Patient-Survey-Supplementary-Dental-Analysis-January-to-March-2025

GP-Patient-Survey-Supplementary-Dental-Analysis-January-to-March-2024-(Revised)

GP Patient Survey Dental Statistics