Smile Direct Club - the $9bn Failure
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- Published: Sunday, 10 December 2023 08:33
- Written by Peter Ingle
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They came, they disrupted, they went under.
GDPUK view: The regulators had a massive fail on this business, they are there to protect the public and they have not done so. The regulators bully and pressure the High Street dentist, but GDC and CQC did not apply any standards to the hefty American outfit with litigious lawyers. This was clearly the practise of dentistry.
Two simple aspects: Every patient should have a named professional responsible for their care. Plus in the event of closure for any reason, the practice must ensure there is ongoing care in place. This issue has yet to hit the High Street.
SmileDirectClub which was once valued at nearly nine billion dollars, and had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy a few months ago, is to start an immediate “wind down” and is set to be liquidated.
The British Association of Private Dentistry (BAPD) were the first dental organisation to comment. In their statement they said that the profession internationally had done its best to warn the public of the dangers of this approach to providing aligner therapy. The sudden halt in operations will leave many Smile Direct customers part way through treatment, and BAPD are confident that their members will assist them sympathetically and professionally, when asked.
It is not just SDC’s customers who will lose out, their employees will have woken up at the weekend to huge uncertainty, as Christmas approaches.
The GDC and CQC will need to rapidly switch to “lessons have been learned” mode, since this failure had been predicted and warned about for some time. Professional associations, leaders and many individuals, have repeatedly tried to alert both the GDC and the CQC to the risks that the Smile direct model posed to members of the public. Despite this, the two regulators tasked with protecting the public did very little, and must carry some responsibility to those customers who are now abandoned part way through their treatments.
The UK website for SDC now has a holding page, headed Customer FAQ. It begins:
“SmileDirectClub has made the incredibly difficult decision to wind down its global operations, effective immediately. For new customers interested in SmileDirectClub services, thank you for your interest, but aligner treatment is no longer available through our telehealth platform. For existing customers, we apologize for the inconvenience, but customer care support is no longer available. Thank you for your support and letting us improve over 2 million smiles and lives.”
In answer to other questions it explains that:
- Those who have placed orders, and are waiting for their aligners, will not get them.
- That aligner treatment is no longer available through the SDC platform. “If you wish to continue treatment outside of our platform, please consult your treating doctor or your local dentist with any questions around future aligner treatment.”
- Customers who financed their aligners with SmilePay, their payment plan, are expected to continue to make all monthly payments until payment has been made in full.
- The ‘Lifetime Smile Guarantee’ no longer exists, ‘with immediate effect.’
- Those hoping to receive refunds will have to wait until the bankruptcy process determines the next steps.
As the BAPD note, all of this raises questions about the provision for continuing care which registration with the CQC would require. It appears that there is no provision for this, so members of the public who have signed up for the payment plan will have to pay for aligners they will not receive. Some will have to find a practitioner willing to take them on to continue their treatment, at additional cost, and no doubt many will simply have to abandon their treatment. The named dentists who nominally were responsible for patients, may be having an anxious weekend.
Writing a previous piece on GDPUK a contributor did the Smile direct websites ‘are you a suitable candidate’ test. Despite their request to look like an owl, it transpired that they were suitable. In the two months since they had received almost daily emails from SDC with a variety of offers encouraging them to sign up. The offers were always just about to end, and then repeated, again and again. The last such email was received less than 24 hours before SDC stopped trading.
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