The short answer
Yes. Two reasons.
The first is that the person booking is often not the patient. It is the daughter at work on a laptop, or the son who has just been told at Sunday lunch that the bottom set has never fitted properly. That person will not ring you during your opening hours. They will book, or they will move on to the clinic that let them.
The second is that a large, simple booking flow works perfectly well for older patients. What does not work is a small, cluttered one. The problem was never the patient's age.
And you keep the phone equally prominent, so nobody is ever forced into a form.
What "equally prominent" actually means
Not a Book button in the header and a number in the footer. A pair of buttons, the same size, side by side, on every screen: Book online and a tap-to-call phone number. Header, home page, every denture type page, the repair page, and a fixed bar at the bottom of the screen on phones.
If your booking button is bigger, brighter or higher than your phone number, you have quietly told a seventy-year-old patient that the form is the proper way and the phone is the awkward one.
What makes a booking flow work for this audience
Large text that survives being made larger. Test the whole flow with the phone's system text size scaled up, which is how a great many of your patients read. Buttons must not overlap, labels must not disappear, and the calendar must not collapse.
Big tap targets with space between them. Thumb sized, with real gaps, so an unsteady hand does not dial when it meant to book.
Few fields. Name, phone, email, what they need, and a box to describe the problem. Nothing about health history. That belongs in the clinic and in your practice software, never in a website form.
Plain labels. "What do you need" beats "Appointment modality" every time.
Visible labels, not placeholder text. Placeholders vanish the moment somebody types, and that is where forms get abandoned.
A line for the family member. "Booking for someone else? Tell us their name and yours." One optional field, and it saves a confusing morning.
Confirmation by text as well as email. With the address, the parking and the number to ring.
The routes that actually get used
Once a clinic runs both properly, the pattern is usually the same. Consultations get booked online, often in the evening, often by a family member. Repairs get phoned, because a broken denture is urgent and people want a voice. Existing patients ring, because they already know you.
That is not an argument against online booking. It is an argument for building both routes properly and then tracking which page produces which.
If your software cannot publish live availability
Some practice systems publish a live diary, some do not, and it varies by plan. Dentally, Software of Excellence, Cliniko, Jane and Acuity are the systems most often behind a clinic in this field. Check with your vendor what your plan actually exposes before the website promises a live calendar.
Where live availability is not possible, do not fake it. Use a request form with an honest promise: "Send this and we will ring you back the same working day." Then keep it. A callback you honour converts better than a calendar that turns out to be wrong.
The one thing that must not happen
Two diaries. If a receptionist takes a phone booking into a book the online system cannot see, you will double book, and a double booked eighty year old who came in on a bus is a bad afternoon for everybody. Online availability and phone bookings have to come from the same diary.
Test it the way your patients use it
Book a consultation from a phone, one handed, with the text size turned up, in daylight. Then ring the number from the page and find out where the call goes at seven in the evening. Whichever of those two irritated you is the one to fix first.
Where this sits
Online booking with the phone number beside it, both tested at large text sizes, is one of the standard pieces of a denture clinic website, and the same principle runs through the other dental practice websites we build. The packages are on pricing. Build both routes, keep them the same size, and let the patient choose.