Hygienists make up a huge component of a dental practice’s atmosphere and productivity. You should be devoting plenty of time to understanding their motivations as well as your own. Even better, you should actively consider how best to support them.

Supporting New Hygienists

One obvious instance of support a dentist can provide occurs with the dental hygienist who is fresh out of school. Hiring someone new to the field confers pros and cons. The biggest upside is that you can mold them to your preferences. But in that upside lies a heavy burden: You must be willing to guide their learning and influence their patient care.

A hygienist who is very new to either your practice or dentistry itself needs plenty of time to become oriented. You can support them by seeing all of their patients for a while and completing an extremely thorough exam. This will ensure both the hygienist and patient get the most out of the experience.

Take steps like:

1. Ensure all deposits that can be removed are removed.
2. Observe the gingiva and determine if prophylaxis has caused as little trauma as possible.
3. Measure pocket depths to calibrate the hygienists readings to yours.
4. Look closely for decay and provide an opportunity for the hygienist to feel the signs of disease that you do.
5. Check for wear or breakdown and teach both patient and hygienist how to see it.
6. Carry out an oral cancer exam and clarify what is cause for concern.
7. Point out what draws your attention on an x-ray.
8. Finally, make any diagnostics you offer into a learning experience for both the patient and the hygienist.

Once you feel comfortable that your hygienist is appropriately skilled, you must open lines of communication surrounding who handles what responsibilities.

How do you bring new hygienists into your practice culture? Please let me know! 

How you help patients become healthier in your practice is a big question. That’s even more true when the role of your hygienists is unclear. The best method of serving patients well can become hazy due to procedural problems that have nothing much to do with care.

Hygienists in the Dental Practice

For example, there is some confusion over the relationship between the insurance company, dentist, and hygienist. Essentially, what level of care are hygienists allowed to handle and why? This brings up multiple concerns such as their ability to diagnose, who the patient wants to hear recommendations from, and how a periodic exam is charged.

The only way to figure out the right answers to these areas of interest is to take a hard look at your individual dental practice. There is no one perfect solution, no size fits all. You have to decide what is appropriate based on your relationship to hygienists on your team as well as their skill and knowledge levels.

Who Does What?

Clarity is a great motivator. When people understand their purpose, they are better able to carry it out well. The only way you can have clarity around the role of hygienists that will then seep over to them is to separate the expectations you feel bound by from what you actually think is best.

Taking the time to consider the big picture of your practice can go a long way. You can only maximize all the personnel resources at your disposal, including a hygienist’s communication skills, technical knowledge, personal perspective, and time, if you know why you’ve hired them in the first place.

First, determine where a hygienist’s value fits into your practice. What clinical service is your best and what behavioral service is your best? Most importantly: Who provides these services and why?

Where do hygienists fit into your dental practice? Give me a shout in the comments below!

Leadership shouldn’t be a happy accident or something you fall into simply by virtue of becoming a dentist. It should be an acknowledged responsibility that you treat with genuine seriousness.

Of course, your instincts shouldn’t necessarily be ignored, but can they always be trusted? As the dentist, you are by default a leader. In reality, you should understand your role in shaping your practice’s vision as well as fostering growth for the entire team.

The hardest part about navigating the nebulous realm of leadership is clarifying and meeting the duties ascribed to your role. For dentists, you are actually fulfilling four different roles, all of which are important for general morale and success.

4 Roles of the Dental Leader

Follow the leader has real meaning in a professional space. One of your primary roles is that of the vision initiator. You have to be bold, verbal, and engaged in your vision to help your team attain the same values. You need to be fully present, especially when your practice is new or developing. The future depends on how you see it.

You will also become the educator in your practice, if you haven’t already. You must guide patients and team members toward your expectations for care. They can’t identify with your vision if you don’t yourself have the skills to state it clearly.

Your third role is that of the vision facilitator. At some point, your team and practice will be fully imbued with the tangible effects of your vision. You have to make the effort to prevent that vision from stalling through team building and careful hiring.

Finally, you must embrace your role as a mentor. This may be more challenging if you have a very strong personality, as it can make people embrace your vision even if they don’t appreciate the philosophy. What you want is a sort of vision immortality, so that even if you leave the practice, your vision and leadership live on.

Exceptional service is more than just a set of benchmarks we strive to reach in the dental practice daily. It’s a philosophy that steers the ship, drives everyone on the team to seek greatness. As such, it can’t be a mandate handed down to your team. It has to go deeper than that.

There are three things you can do that will enable your team to embrace and embody exceptional service. Remember, it must be natural to them, instead of forced, if the impression they give is to come across as genuine.

3 Steps to Truly Exceptional Service

1. Be a Good Role Model

This may seem too simple to work, but it’s like magic. Model exceptional service and your team will inevitably follow suit. Set an example that also sets the tone for your dental practice as a whole. Go out of your way to surprise patients with how good your service can be.

It’s easy to expect greatness from others while not putting the same pressure on yourself. Walk the talk. Live an unbridled excitement for patient care that’s completely clear of resentment toward their demands or needs.
Choose quality and excellence in every way you can, whether that be in your stationary, your lab, or even the drinks you have in the waiting room.

2. Hire People Who Go the Extra Mile

During your hiring process, make an effort to find team members who inherently want to go above and beyond. They should have a personality intent on always taking success to the next level. It’s not as difficult to sense this in an interview as you might think.

Ask the interviewee what they consider an exceptional doctor’s office experience. Go even further and ask them to talk about their own experience providing care beyond expectations. Then, ask why they did this. Use your own intuition to decide what their story means about them.

3. Reward Exceptional Actions

No dentist is an island, which is why you’re always hearing about the importance of your team. It’s a lesson we all need to be reminded of throughout the years as we grow complacent, things change, or new challenges arise that reveal cracks in our team’s capabilities.

Your Team is Key to Exceptional Service

Because exceeding expectations is an intangible thing, you can’t easily make it an actual practice policy. It’s not a rule, it’s a goal. If you want to make delivering exceptional service part of your practice brand, it needs to be an aim shared by all of the people on your team. They must genuinely enjoy delivering exceptional care. It must be the attitude that drives them.

But like anything, your intention to mandate exceptional service can backfire. This will leave you frustrated and your patients confused. A great analogy of this is an experience my husband and I had purchasing a car. The salesman insisted on taking us to a repair place nearby, despite the fact that we knew where it was. He told us he couldn’t get a ’10’ on the sale otherwise. As it turned out, this task was necessary to fit the quality control expectations of his superiors.

Exceptional Service Can’t Be a Mandate

This transparency wasn’t a good thing. It made it sound like our salesman was more worried about his performance review than our needs. The exact same problem can happen in the dental office. It’s why you don’t want to make exceptional service a strict rule. It has to be genuinely wanted by your team.

So how do you develop a practice culture that makes this happen? It all comes down to three key factors that will encourage your team to embody a true passion for patient care …

Check out Part 2 of this series soon!

Our good intentions and true thoughts surrounding a difficult situation with a patient can get lost in the communication process. When we fail to meet patient expectations, we can almost become a different person.

Our patient interprets what we say and do as demonstrations of our character. This is why, if we want to resolve conflicts and make patients feel understood, we need to pay special attention to showing that we care.

How to Show You Care About Patient Concerns

There are many ways to show you care that can be beneficial on both sides. It also helps to take criticism not as a personal affront, but as an opportunity for improving our communication skills. It may seem counterintuitive, but the best way to soothe or diffuse heightened emotions is to let people experience them. Allow patients to fully express their upset, instead of trying to shoot them down or make light of the situation.

Then, truly embrace empathy. Don’t just listen and nod without truly empathizing with their upset. Let them know that you understand how hard the situation is for them. Next, acknowledge the challenge of revealing their true feelings by thanking them for their honesty and for telling you what they think.

And then there’s the hardest part: apologize. You don’t need to admit you’re guilty and beg their forgiveness. You simply need to express how sorry you are that they are experiencing upset. Also, don’t assume that you can guess how to fix the problem.

Ask your patient how they want to be helped and be honest about whether you can make it work. By patiently listening and acknowledging their feelings, you may have already given them exactly what they wanted.

How do you show your patients that you care? Let us know in the comments! 

The hygiene exam can be a dreaded topic in the dental practice, especially if you’ve been dodging the issue for a while. Depending on your state, there may be specific rules or regulations about how the hygiene exam should be conducted. After meeting these rules though, it’s up to you to determine what style of hygiene exam best suits your goals.

Hygiene exams can complicate your relationship with hygienists if you don’t have an open dialogue about why you conduct them the way you do. There isn’t one right or wrong way to do things. That’s what makes it such a challenge for clinicians.

Conducting a More Effective Hygiene Exam

Commitment to your purpose should help you decide on how you want a hygiene exam to go. Most importantly, don’t do something you dislike simply because you think it’s the only option. Your obligation is to meet your patients’ needs while fulfilling your ethical or moral responsibility.

Patient expectations are where things get tricky. It doesn’t necessarily matter if your style is to put most of the responsibility in your hygienist’s hands or if you prefer to enact a thorough exam yourself. What does matter is that your patient knows what to expect and that you meet that expectation.

If you want to meet with patients for an in-depth exam, then schedule that time. If your hygienist will handle the majority of the exam, give them the tools and the training they need to feel confident. By the same token, if you want to check in on patients, but don’t want to do more than visit, then don’t even put on your gloves.

In the end, you can choose a combination of hygiene exam processes. Just keep your patients and your team informed.

How do you conduct hygiene exams in your practice and why? We’d love to hear from you!

In life, there are few things that are truly a ‘guarantee.’ This word has been thrown around in sales speak for eons, but it’s also an empowering tool by which to build your dental practice. You may not be able to control the outcome of every aspect of your patient care. On the other hand, you can definitely commit to always going the extra mile to secure complete satisfaction.

What is a Guarantee in Dentistry?

Your practice culture should be defined verbally or in writing through your vision and mission. It should also be held as the unspoken, consistent values you communicate to staff and patients on a daily basis. You don’t need a cheesy catchphrase beneath your practice logo saying, ‘100% satisfaction or we’ll completely redo your dental work’ to make your service a guarantee.

But what does a guarantee look like in dentistry and why is it beneficial? Think of a guarantee as the powerful conviction that you stand behind your work and will continuously strive for exceptional service. If your motto is to exceed expectations and you make that clear to your patients, then you will go to any lengths to do exactly that.

Commit to Complete Satisfaction

A guarantee is an ethic of personal responsibility. It is your integrity and it will speak for itself in a hundred ways if you follow through. It means you will take the time to determine what satisfaction looks like for your patients. The main benefit of this is the development of a rock solid service reputation. You won’t have to go to the yellow pages for explicit ‘we guarantee it’ marketing. Word of mouth will snowball as your confidence in what you offer translates to how comfortable your staff and patients feel recommending you.

Excellence is a rarity fueled by integrity. Develop your patients’ and team members’ pride in your work by incorporating a guarantee into your dental practice culture.

How do you go above and beyond in your clinical care? 

There are four cornerstones of dentistry that determine a balance essential for true success. In Part 1 of this series, I discussed Clinical Services and Patient Care, which have an external focus on patients. They guide how you and your standards are viewed by your community and presented to them.

Now, I’ll dive into Team Participation and Practice Growth and Development. These two cornerstones have an internal focus that shape quality of life and internal direction.

All four of the interrelated cornerstones will impact success in dentistry, especially if one is out of balance with the others. Use them to identify your current reality, vision for the future, and action plan.

Cornerstones of Dentistry: Team Participation and Practice Growth and Development

Team Participation

Team participation is a tacit feature of all dental practices. Team members have a huge impact on the practice atmosphere, as well as the collective success of patient care. Individually, the level and quality of team participation must be cultivated and supported based on your practice vision.

You can seek out and hire team members who are passionate and keen on raising the practice up. You can also determine standards for teamwork built on healthy expectations, the fair exchange of ideas, and support of insights. You can design a culture that enables different opinions to thrive in light of shared values. You can share the ups and downs, as well as the pride and purpose, of working together.

Practice Growth & Development

You have the ultimate say in defining and instituting a standard for growth. In your practice, you create and have responsibility for meeting goals related to finances, size of patient base, size of practice team, and your schedule.

Your personal and professional growth is your decision. You can seek out opportunities that fit your educational desires and sense of monetary value. It’s not helpful to compare yourself to other practices, because their goals and how they achieve them will not be the same. The ‘return on investment’ for CE and other professional development can only be gauged by you.

Success in dentistry centers on four cornerstones that focus both externally and internally. Though they provide a clear foundation, of course every dentist and dental team will have a different sense of how to measure their success.

Part of what makes your practice unique are the standards you set in each of the four cornerstones: Clinical Services, Patient Care, Team Participation, and Practice Growth and Development.

In this blog, I’ll discuss the first two cornerstones and in Part 2 I’ll discuss the final two essential pieces of the practice puzzle. Together, they create a critical balance, especially in how they interact dynamically.

Cornerstones of Dentistry: Clinical Services and Patient Care

Clinical Services

Each dentist will have their own individual sense of what services they wish to provide and how they want to structure their practice system. With this kind of freedom, the clinician decides what standards of care are enforced and how they are applied to practice services.

Part of why dentistry is such an exciting and opportunity-filled profession is that this kind of flexibility exists. You can say what matters to you and design a practice that embraces your values. You are the only one who can determine your level of commitment.

Patient Care

It’s up to you how you will care for your patients. You are able to pursue aspirational paths of continuing to seek education, empowering yourself and others, and partnering with your patients and team.

You can also guide your patients and support them in reaching the highest levels of health they can. Along with your freedom to set standards for yourself, you can also decide how much trust you will share with your patients. Then, you can create relationships built on that degree of trust.

To be continued…

How do you define your values and vision in your dental practice?