Dear
Vikki
Keep your hygienist busy & profitable
Over the last few months, I’ve found a number of practices reporting that hygiene bookings are down and FTAs are on the increase – yet this isn’t a universal experience. Those practices (dentists) that are firmly ‘on message’ and actively supporting the hygiene referral/ongoing maintenance programme are doing just fine, if not growing their hygiene service.
Here is my thinking on hygiene books.
- The really good private preventive practice should be able to easily keep a very profitable hygienist fully occupied for 4 days for every 5 days dentistry available.
- The dentist always tells patients why they are visiting the hygienist (and it’s never for a ‘scale and polish’ or a ‘cleaning’ – it’s got to be all about staying healthy/reducing risks of fillings/heart disease etc).
- The dentist always supports the ongoing visit patterns of maintenance patients (the visits keep them healthy).
- Everyone in the practice always shows concern if patients fail to book, cancel, miss an appointment, delay hygiene visits – as these are always presented as essential to the patient’s ongoing dental health.
- Oh, and the hygienist is a great communicator. (I’ve often said that I don’t care if a hygienist can’t scrape the butter off her toast – it’s the influence on patients’ habits that really makes a difference)
- Administrative games such as joint appointments and FTA fines don’t really do the trick of increasing appreciation and loyalty and can backfire.
It can take a lot of focus, some organisation and support materials, and
I’ve always been fascinated by communication and misunderstanding – the ability of one human being to interpret a word, phrase or intention that was completely different to the meaning intended.
Dental professionals use many words that mean something different to patients. Try some of these out, and see if you can find a better way to explain what you really mean when you’re hoping to get an idea across to patients.
| You use…
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You mean…
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Patient hears…
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| Check up
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The most important thing you ever do for patients, including checking up to 16 different bits of the mouth to see how healthy it is
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That 30 second poke at my teeth and maybe my gums, that I used to endure as a child, to see if there are any holes that need filling
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| Tooth brushing or cleaning
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Removal of every little bit of plaque and debris from every surface of every tooth every day, including the bits under the gum and between the teeth
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Borrowing my husband’s toothbrush every few days to remove the last bit of dinner from teeth
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| You’re doing well, just need to do a bit more
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I’m encouraging you, but you’re still caked in wall-to-wall plaque and this has to be removed from every surface of every tooth every day…
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Ah. I’m ok then. No need to change anything.
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| Simple filling
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I can do this in my sleep
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If it’s that **** simple, why does it cost £***, and why can’t I just do it myself?
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If you’re already ahead of the game and organising or upgrading your LDU, or new sterilization suite – fantastic. But don’t forget to tell your patients what’s going on – sterilisation/patient protection is still third on the list of what patients really want from their practice/judge their practices on, and they need reassurance that it’s happening!
Please put signs up on the doors to the sterilization area, and make your processes obvious to patients – I’ve long since found that when autoclaves started to move out of surgeries, patients’ appreciation of attention to sterilization dropped – they no longer saw the process happening/you no longer mentioned the heat/steam/noise/beeping/loading or unloading of the beasts! Don’t forget to bring your visibility back up!
And make sure you are seen wiping down surgery surfaces! I had a few full ‘mystery shops’ done by real patients (i.e., people not involved in dentistry at all) and all of them commented spontaneously (thankfully, appreciatively) on watching DCPs wiping down surfaces! Oh how revealing these mystery shops were too – but that’s for another report.
On a related subject… I recently spent most of a weekend in our local A & E with the Gorgeous One… and then visiting him on a surgical ward for a couple of days. It was interesting that despite big posters on infection control and hand washing all over the place, nobody asked us to use the hand wipe and we saw none of the doctors and nurses attending him doing so either. It made us wary of appearing to go out of our way (well, me going out of my way, he was a bit incapacitated at the time) to find the hand rubs, and him trying to steer clear of his doctor’s flopping tie during exams, and trying to get out of shaking his hand on greeting.
I’m fairly certain that your patients feel the same way when they spot grubby bits in your public areas and wonder who’s been in the chair before them, spraying spit on the light and instrument panel. Make sure your patients know that you ‘decontaminate' thoroughly between patients!
Please use your next practice meeting to discuss how you can take your decontamination routines out of the closet - and impress your patients!
Making contact
