It’s winning smiles at an NHS dental surgery in London’s East End which has today passed the Care Quality Commission scrutiny for its safety.

Poplar’s Dental Practice, opened 30 years ago, has been given a clean bill of health after passing the muster on safety and other issues investigated by the Commission.

“We carried out an inspection with a dental specialist advisor in September,” a Care Commission spokesman revealed. “We toured the practice looking at the storage arrangements for emergency medicines and equipment and spoke to patients and staff. We also observed a dental nurse carrying out decontamination procedures of instruments.”

The inspection was to see if the service was safe, effective, caring, responsive and well-run.

The practice passed in all five areas—with no action needed, its report out today shows.

The three-storey surgery in West India Dock Road, with its two treatment rooms and a decontamination suite, was set up by Dr Matthew Spencer Brown in the 1980s which he still runs today with three colleagues, John Srotyr, Farida Haque and Farida Ghani, and a team of dental nurses.

One of his long-standing regular patients, Gerald White, commented on the Dental Practice website: “I’ve had dental work everywhere—London, New York, Tokyo, Bangkok. My doctor of choice has a Harley Street practice, but my dentist of choice is down East India Dock Road.

“Spencer Brown has been my family dentist for nigh on 30 years, around that time he made the decision to open a practice in East India Dock Road, rather than go into up market Harley Street, to bring quality dental services to what was a poor, run down area of London.”

Three decades of treating NHS patients in the East End has given Dr Spencer Brown a biting edge—so he may be a bit long in the tooth for any Care Quality Commission inspection.