More About Urgencies & Emergencies

Urgencies & Emergencies aims to simplify and greatly speed up the way patients find and book a dentist, with the service mapping the location of practitioners in a given area and highlighting those with available appointments. “Our aim was to simplify the search process for patients with both urgent and non-urgent dental needs,” says Dr Azlan Daud. Azlan, who emigrated to New Zealand some 15 years ago, and now works as a dental practitioner with a special interest in endodontics in Christchurch.

“For someone in acute pain or just requiring a routine dental treatment, finding an available appointment on that particular day, is no easy task,” he says. “The fortunate ones will see a dental practitioner on the same day, but the majority of patients end up being attended to, on another day.” Being in the profession for 25 years, Azlan knows that some dental practices keep an emergency slot available on any given day, or they may have a slot become available at short notice when one of their own patients cancels.

“The challenge is for patients to identify which practices have such availability. Even with on-line booking systems present for some practices, patients will still require some degree of trial-and-error searching. What makes matters worse is that most patients do not extend their search past the first page of the engine used, simply because its time consuming,” he says.

Urgencies & Emergencies automatically links to participating practices to make their location and availability visible from a single website, all on one screen.

“Practices link to us using a simple status toggle. Once registered, real-time availability status can be activated and deactivated from any number of desktops or mobile devices, by any staff member of the practice,” he says. “For example, if an appointment slot became available due to a cancellation at 3:00 pm today, clicking on the available toggle tells Urgencies & Emergencies to automatically flag to the world that the practice has an availability. Should someone call and take the appointment, the practice clicks the toggle again to reflect that the availability is no longer present.

Azlan, together with his technical co-founder Aydan Brown, said that they had to design the service to be as simple and easy to use as possible for patients. They also took suggestions from practitioners to ensure that the system would also work effectively for practices. The product has been functioning only in Auckland and Christchurch thus far, however, they will be extending the services to other healthcare providers New Zealand wide at the end of May.

For more information on emergency dentists, 24-hour dentists and 24-hour emergency dentists please go to https://une.nz/.