Volunteer for treatment
The dental hospital at Leeds Dental Institute offers routine dental care to support the training of the next generation of dental care professionals – dentists, dental hygienists, dental therapists, dental technicians and dental nurses. As an NHS teaching hospital, it provides specialist treatment and advice to the population of Leeds and the surrounding region.
How to volunteer for dental treatment by students
The School of Dentistry has a limited number of places available for volunteers for treatment by undergraduate dental students or dental hygiene and dental therapy students, as part of the students’ clinical education.
You may be eligible to volunteer for this service if you are not registered with a dentist in the region or your dentist has specifically advised you to register using this website. If you have received treatment recently at the School of Dentistry, this opportunity is not open to you.
To volunteer, you must first make an expression of interest by completing and submitting the online registration form. We will need your name, address, telephone number, date of birth and doctor’s details to arrange a screening appointment for you and to assess whether your dental and oral needs are suitable for student treatment. Please note that no appointment can be made if any of these details are missing. Our data protection policy can be found at the bottom of the page.
Volunteers undergo a 15-minute assessment (longer if an X-ray picture is required) to determine whether their dental needs match the treatments available on our undergraduate programmes. If it is found that there is such a match, the volunteer would be placed on an appropriate student waiting list and be required to sign a contract of agreement.
If you are found to be suitable for treatment by a student and are able to attend as required, the Institute may be able to offer you a single course of dental treatment such as scaling and polishing, fillings, crowns, bridges or veneers.
Once this course of treatment is completed, you will be discharged. If your treatment needs are not suitable for our students, you will not be accepted for treatment.
The waiting times for most forms of treatment are not excessively long, though there are some exceptions. Treatment is provided free of charge.
School of Dentistry reserves the right to close access to waiting lists for treatment by students at any time (this may occur within days of this notice appearing) and apologises in advance if we are unable to help you.
Find out more about volunteering for treatment
You can find out more about volunteering and registering by getting in touch with our team.
Please note that you are volunteering for treatment by undergraduate dental students or dental hygiene and dental therapy students, as part of the students’ clinical education.
You will be asked for your name, address, telephone number, date of birth and doctor’s details in the registration form. This will allow us to arrange a screening appointment for you and to assess whether your dental and oral needs are suitable for student treatment.
Our data protection policy
The data you provide when registering to be a volunteer for student treatment will be used to invite you to a preliminary dental examination and together with the results of that examination will inform our decision whether or not to allocate you to one of our student programmes.
Your data will be stored on a secure server with access (via password) available only to The School of Dentistry's Director of Student Education, Clinical Director, the designated Patient Waiting List Coordinator and the IT Systems Administrator.
Your data collected will not be made available to any third party and will be removed from the database after a period of 12 months or on completion of any course of treatment (whichever is the greater), unless specific authorisation to keep the data for an extended period has been granted.