Our fee guarantee: We guarantee our fees will never exceed the Australian Dental Association's (ADA) average Australian fees of the previous year. We are a family owned practice who have been a part of the Tamworth community for 16 years, and so we strive to serve this community and provide the best value we can. We will never aim to be the cheapest in town, we believe it is better to do the job right the first time around.

§ Bulk bill for DVA patients (Department of Veteran Affairs)

§ No gap payment for Medicare's Child Dental Benefit Scheme: $1000 of dental support for those eligible. All you need to do is bring your Medicare Card (and your child, of course) along. Read more at http://www.humanservices.gov.au/customer/services/medicare/child-dental-benefits-schedule

BUPA Preferred providers, get more for your money!

§ HCF (preventative) preferred providers, meaning you get the most out of your health fund claims. As preferred providers, we use HCF item numbers and their fees. Using these gives you the absolute maximum rebate on each part of your dental procedure, meaning the smallest gap for you. It provides you with the certainty of up to 100% back and at least 60% back on most general and major dental services.

HCF members with selected extras cover get 100% back on a range of diagnostic and preventative services including 1-2 fully covered check-ups each year and two mouthguards

**Subject to your level of cover and available limits. We can contact your health fund with you to check.

Stressed about the bill?

Please feel free to discuss your financial situation with our staff. Serving our community is our priority. We will do our best to help you.

How can we help?

1. If you are in a health fund: Health funds are notoriously difficult and confusing! Let us help decode what it all means. We can contact your health insurance together with you and then tailor your dental plan around your cover.

We can provide a print out of all the item numbers of your treatment plan, which the health fund can then use to tell you exactly how much you are going to get back.

Our Hicaps machine lets us claim your health fund rebate on the day using your card, so you only pay the gap. That means no more going to the funds to claim your rebate!

2. Prepayment plans. When we see you, we will let you know what treatment is urgent, and what treatment can be done over several years. This means you can plan ahead rather than being caught off-guard for major dental work. Prepayment plans work like a lay-by where each week, fortnight or as you feel like it, you transfer money into your own account with us and this goes towards your future/planned dental treatment. This has several benefits; it means you aren't put in a situation of paying for all your dental treatment in one day, it shows us you're serious about improving your dental health, and allows us to see what sort of time-frame you need to complete your plan and we can work around that.

3. Payment Plans (Instalment Payments)

Although our policy is normally that all invoices are paid on the day of treatment, we do understand that this is not always possible. For this reason, we offer payment plans which allows you to get the treatment you need, and then spread the cost over a period of time that suits your budget. Our wonderful practice manager, Barbara surprises many people with how affordable she can make dentistry. She will sit down with you one-on-one and personalise a plan of action for you. Please call (02) 6766 1766 and ask to talk to Barbara.

Guarantee/Warranty

We provide a warranty for crowns for 5 years if they have been done with us from start to finish. This does require you however, to attend regular check-ups and preventative appointments to assess for recurrent decay or any other damage to your teeth early so it can be treated promptly.

We are here to stay. As a family-run practice, we are part of your community too. We are not a health-fund owned practice or a corporate dental practice. What does this mean for you? It means we honour our work. It means we always have the long-term in mind because we know patching things up might be the easiest thing to do today, but will come back harder to fix later. It means no short cuts and no cheap materials, only the best dentistry we can deliver. Marius Street Family Dental has served Tamworth for 70 years, and we have every intention of being here for another 70 years.

Implants: if you have an implant placed with us, we can guarantee that we only use the best brands and companies that assure us that their parts will be available for the next 100 years. All materials are certified – which is important as you need to make sure its medical grade titanium that is being used. This fits in with our philosophy of life-time dentistry. Many patients don't know that there are many, many different implant manufacturers and systems. Why is this an issue? If you get an implant that doesn't use a major system, it will be very hard for you to get that implant serviced because dentists won't have those implant-specific parts.

Sterilisation: In accordance with the Infection Control Standards by the Australian Dental Association (ADA) we use the latest Class IIB Autoclave to sterilise our instruments. We follow strict sterilisation protocols for every single patient. We have recently attended the latest Infection Control courses and made improvements to our protocols so you can have peace-of-mind that your family is safe and taken care of. If you have any questions, please talk to our Infection Control Officer, Amie.

· CBCT machine on-site for 3D x-rays

· Centrifuge for implant and dental surgery - we can use special factors from your own body to get faster and better healing. Hicaps machine on-site

· Intra-oral camera and professional extra-oral camera to take quality records of your dental journey

• Digital x-rays which are much lower radiation exposure than traditional xrays:

We have replaced the old chemical-developed x-rays with the latest digital and phosphor plate xrays to reduce the radiation exposure to you. This also means that x-rays can be seen almost instantly, and can be emailed or printed.

§ Happy gas machine for extremely nervous patients or children

§ We keep up-to-date with new dental developments and are always attending further education to make sure that we are always improving our techniques, knowledge and machines.

§ Ipads for children interaction and myofunctional training

§ Hicaps machine to claim your health fund rebate onsite for your convenience

§ latest sterilisation equipment