6,500 words. 28 days. Your practice manager has patients to see.
Dental practices face the same CQC Provider Information Return as care homes — 6,500 words of evidenced content across the five key questions, due within a 28-day window. The difference is that your registered manager is also running a clinical practice. They don't have a week to sit in the office writing the PIR. They have evenings and weekends. Your PIR agent reads your existing records — complaints log, training matrix, infection control audits, patient feedback, staff supervision records — and drafts each section with evidence mapped to the 34 Quality Statements. Your practice manager reviews and approves, not authors.
What Your Agent Actually Does
Your PIR agent assembles evidence from your existing practice records and drafts a CQC-ready Provider Information Return — so your registered manager can focus on running the practice.
Maps evidence to all 34 Quality Statements
Your agent reads across complaints, training records, infection control logs, patient surveys, supervision records, and clinical governance minutes — then maps evidence to the relevant Quality Statements under each key question. Safe, effective, caring, responsive, well-led — covered with your actual data.
Drafts in CQC's language, not yours
Inspectors read hundreds of PIRs. The ones that land use CQC's own terminology — Quality Statements, evidence descriptors, the Single Assessment Framework structure. Your agent writes in the framework's language while keeping the content specific to your practice.
Flags evidence gaps before the deadline
No infection control audit in six months? Complaints log not updated? Staff supervision overdue? Your agent identifies what's missing from the evidence base and tells you while there's still time to fix it — not when you're drafting at 11pm on day 27.
Handles dental-specific evidence requirements
HTM 01-05 decontamination compliance, IRMER radiation protection, dental-specific safeguarding, DSPT completion — your agent understands the evidence that's unique to dental practice CQC registration and ensures it appears in the right sections.
Produces a draft ready for practice manager sign-off
The output is a structured, evidenced PIR draft your registered manager can review, amend, and approve — not a rough outline that needs three more hours of work. Your manager's expertise is in knowing whether the draft is accurate, not in writing it from scratch.
The real numbers.
| Practice manager time writing PIR (evenings/weekends) | £800–£1,500 |
| Consultant PIR review or drafting support | £500–£1,500 |
| Time gathering evidence from practice records | £200–£500 |
| Realistic annual cost | £1,500–£3,500 |
| Agent build (one-off, configured to your practice records) | £2,000–£3,500 |
| Monthly running costs (hosting + AI usage) | £80–£150/month |
| CQC framework updates as Quality Statements evolve | Included in first year |
| Realistic first-year total | £2,960–£5,300 |
The PIR is supposed to be straightforward. In practice, it's a registered manager spending evenings pulling evidence from six different systems and writing narratives against a framework they look at once a year. The 28-day window always arrives at the worst possible time.
Year two onwards, the agent cost drops to running costs only — roughly £960–£1,800/year — while the stress and time cost of manual PIR writing stays exactly the same.
Good fit / not a fit.
This works brilliantly for:
- Any CQC-registered dental practice preparing for PIR submission
- Practices where the registered manager is also a practising clinician
- Multi-site dental groups needing consistent PIR quality across locations
- Practices that have previously scored Requires Improvement and need stronger evidence
This probably isn't for you if:
- Your practice has a dedicated compliance officer with capacity for PIR drafting
- You're a single-chair practice with very straightforward evidence needs
- You already use a consultant you're happy with and the cost isn't a concern
Let's talk.
We'll start by looking at your last PIR submission and the systems you use for complaints, training, infection control, and supervision records — what's digital, what's paper-based, and where the evidence gathering usually bottlenecks. Usually a 15-minute conversation.
hello@nimblecroft.com