The Real Job

At some point in your dental career, you realise that you want to do more dentistry, better dentistry and full complete dentistry. Do you realise that you want to make a difference in someone’s life? You want to make that positive impact in the way a person sees life.

You know that you can achieve this significance with the comprehensive and complete dentistry that turns an ordinary unhealthy mouth into a functional, healthy, and aesthetically beautiful mouth. However, you also know that gaining acceptance for simple single teeth dentistry is different from gaining acceptance for a fuller comprehensive treatment plan. A fuller comprehensive treatment plan is often more complex and requires more consideration and time in planning and executing the plan.

So, how do you create an environment so that when you present your treatment plan and recommendations, your patient sees the significance and actually “gets it”? How does one establish situations to immediately obvious to the patient that they are in the right place to get their teeth fixed? And most of all, how do you get your patients to understand the dentistry you present to them and its significance?

I feel the real job is to create this significance in our work.

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Creating Significance

You have probably already discovered that patients can experience the dentistry provided very differently to the way we see it. Have you ever had a patient where you thought you did the most amazing job, but all they saw were discrepancies? Alternatively, it may not have been your best work, and yet the patient was ecstatic about the results. Eliminating the uncertainties associated with this mismatch of experience is what comprises the real job.

So, what can we do to better understand our patient’s experiences so that we can improve them?

Firstly, we need to understand that gaining case acceptance is not a sales function alone. It is not about “selling” dentistry to someone. It is more about helping someone discover something of value to them and helping them to appreciate its significance in their life.

Gaining case acceptances is more a process; a journey the patient takes to discover viable solutions to their needs and requirements. Often, this understanding takes effort from multiple aspects of the practice and different members of the team. It does not fall into the responsibility of the Treatment Coordinator or the dentist alone.

Many variables contribute to the entire experience of gaining case acceptances:

• You are establishing a journey the patient takes in your practice. This is so that your patients are able to fully understand your recommendations, and you can understand their needs and requirements more fully.
• Practical communications skills are required from the entire Team so that there are no or minimal misunderstandings.
• Better systems and processes are required to make sure that the entire journey runs smoothly without any delay or dysfunction.
• Dental Skills. The dentist should be competent with the dentistry needed and possess the necessary skills. The Team should also feel confident in the dentist’s ability and technical knowledge.
• Correct marketing strategies are required so that the appropriate patients are attracted with better practice to patient match.
• Effective Team management and motivation are required so that everyone is aligned in their want to establish a practice of significance.

The reason for the above needs for practice is that comprehensive treatment plans require collaboration from multiple facets of practice. This means that in order to establish a uniquely positive experience for your patients, the principal dentists require leadership skills to make all the processes, systems and the teamwork in a unified, cohesive manner. This concept that the greater the complexity of care, the greater the demand for leadership was first introduced to me many years ago by Dr Paul Homoly and since has worked incredibly well.

So, if you want to live a life of significance and make a difference, then you need to understand that the real job is one of Leadership in any dental business. It is Leadership that makes the cogs in the business run smoothly to achieve greater case acceptance.