What is checked in a 100 point assessment?
A Dental Wellness Assessment is an hour, not ten minutes, and it covers around a hundred separate observations. It begins outside the mouth with your face, your jaw joints and the muscles around them, your lymph nodes and your salivary glands. It moves through a full soft tissue and oral cancer screen, then to your gums, scored site by site, then to every tooth individually for decay, wear, cracks, shade, shape and position.
We also take photographs, a digital scan of your teeth and, where it’s clinically justified, radiographs. None of this is unusual dentistry. What is unusual is writing all of it down, in a form you can actually see, rather than calling numbers across the room to a nurse and handing you a leaflet at the end. You leave knowing what is healthy, what is being watched and what needs doing.
Why we look at your face, jaw and salivary glands
Teeth aren’t a separate system. Worn front teeth, cracked molars, headaches on waking and a jaw that clicks or aches are usually the same story told from different angles, and treating the teeth without understanding the bite behind them is how expensive work ends up broken. So I examine how the jaw opens, whether it deviates to one side, whether the muscles are tender and how the teeth actually meet.
Salivary glands matter because saliva is your natural defence against decay. Many common medicines reduce the flow, as do several medical conditions, and a dry mouth changes the risk profile of everything else we plan. Checking the glands, asking about your medicines and understanding your diet tells me more about your future dental health than any single filling ever will.
What is an oral cancer screen and why does it matter?
Mouth cancer cases in the United Kingdom have risen steadily over the last decade, and outcomes depend enormously on how early it’s found. The screen itself is quick and comfortable. I look systematically at the lips, the cheeks, the tongue including underneath and along the sides, the floor of the mouth, the palate and the throat, and I feel the neck and the lymph nodes for anything that has changed.
Most of what I find is entirely harmless: a cheek bitten in your sleep, a bony lump you’ve had since childhood. Occasionally something needs a closer look, and in that case a prompt referral matters more than anything else I could do that day. It’s two minutes of an hour long appointment, and it’s the two minutes that carries the greatest weight of all.
How your gums are scored
Gum disease is the leading cause of tooth loss in adults and it’s usually silent until it’s advanced, which is why measuring beats looking. A fine probe records the depth of the space between gum and tooth at several points around each tooth, along with bleeding, recession, mobility and plaque levels. Those numbers become a chart, and the chart becomes a baseline we can compare against every single year.
That comparison is the valuable part. A single reading tells you where you’re today. Two readings a year apart tell you which direction you’re travelling in, and direction is what determines whether you keep your teeth. Where treatment is needed it usually begins with hygiene and gum therapy, and a thirty minute hygiene visit is £85.
What is a lifetime digital dental passport?
Everything we record at your assessment goes into a single digital file that follows you for as long as you’re our patient. The photographs, the 3D scan of your teeth, the gum chart, the shade and the notes on every tooth. Next year we take the same records again and lay them over the top, so change becomes something visible rather than something remembered.
It changes the conversation completely. Instead of me telling you that a tooth is wearing, I can show you the same tooth three years apart on screen and you can see it for yourself. It also means that if you ever need implant, orthodontic or restorative work, the starting point is already documented in detail, which makes the planning better and the surprises fewer.
Why prevention comes before cosmetic work
I have built a career doing implants and cosmetic dentistry, and I will still tell you that the best dentistry is the dentistry you never need. Bonding placed over an untreated cavity fails. Veneers bonded to inflamed gums look wrong within a year. Implants placed in a mouth with active gum disease are a long term liability. Health first isn’t a slogan, it’s simply the order in which things work.
That’s why every patient at LUSSO starts in the same place, whether you have come for a smile makeover or because a tooth has started to twinge. The assessment finds the problems, sets the baseline and produces a written plan with every fee on it. Then we talk about what you’d like to change, from a position of actually knowing.
What happens at your first visit?
You arrive at 54 Station Approach, directly opposite West Byfleet station, and we begin with a conversation rather than a chair. What has worried you, what you’ve had done before, what you’d like to be different. Then the examination, the photographs and the scan, and then time together on screen going through what we found, in plain language, with you looking at your own mouth.
The Dental Wellness Assessment is £150, the Advanced Digital 3D Scan is £150 and Digital Smile Design is £150. Registering before we open in Q1 2027 includes all three, plus a hygiene visit and a whitening kit, worth £1,010, for £49, for the first 150 patients. Details are on the New Patient Offer and assessment pages.
In short
Everything good in dentistry starts with knowing exactly where you are. An hour, a hundred checks and a record you can look at again next year is worth more than any single treatment I could sell you. Register for the New Patient Offer before we open, and your first visit is on us.
