I have been giving out "New patient packs" for just over a year now and I think they are invaluable. Three main reasons why:
1) "Start as you mean to go on.". The new pt pack makes your consultation (or first emergency appt) so much more comprehensive. So if like me you want to be doing more comprehensive dentistry it makes sense to utilise them. 2) Patients often remember less than half of what you tell them. Having the most important ideas and details in written form to take away avoids this hassle. 3) Everybody likes free things. The pack costs very little to put together but has a very high perceived value. There are many ways of presenting your new pt packs. Up till now I have been using A4 folders to hold it all in. Inside are information sheets With a bit of history about me, the way we book appointments, how to contact us in an emergency, my ethos about photography, our pricelist etc. Also included is an OHI postcard (look out for an upcoming post about these as version 3 are being printed currently). And then finally I included various samples of things like interdental brushes, toothpaste etc. As with all of my other shared documents, the template for my new pt pack can be found in my google drive (go to the useful resources page). The folders I currently use can be seen via the link below which seem to be a reasonable balance between quality and price and allow you to include a business card on the front. When it comes to the samples I just try to include whatever I can find for free or minimal cost. My collection of places to source these can be found here: http://www.drchrisharper.co.uk/blog/do-you-want-free-samples
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It is widely reported that patients routinely remember less than half of the information given to them by their doctor or dentist. This recall is probably even worse when the pt has just been through a traumatic procedure such as having an extraction.
This is why I always give both verbal and written post operative instructions following oral surgery. That way when a pt gets home and can't remember what you said they can look back at the written postops and get all the information they need to carry out effective home care. I find this really seems to minimise the number of times I am asked to call a patient following oral surgery and I believe it has reduced my complication rates such as dry sockets. I have also taken this one stage further by including a few sachets of salt with my post ops to give the pt no reason to avoid the salt water rinses that I recommend for the days following an extraction. I buy these from a cash and carry at a cost of £5 and a box of sachets will last me about 2 years! If you want to use my post op instructions as a template please feel free but obviously you may want to tailor them to how you would normally give your advice. This can be downloaded from my googledrive via the link here: http://www.drchrisharper.co.uk/useful-resources.html I am considering constructing post ops for other procedures. As I do so I will add them to my googledrive as well, or if you already do this feel free to share them here. Do you often find yourself having the same discussions with patients who only want the cheapest option available or whose first question is always "how much will it cost?"
Aversion to unwanted expenditure is part of human nature, but there may be some simple things you can do to help stop your patients from fixating on price and automatically choosing the cheapest solution available. First and foremost is focussing on providing high quality dentistry. But how do your patients know that you are focussed on quality? If they stick with you for many years they will over time realise that their teeth are working well hence proving your capable, but you obviously want them to understand your focus now. Let me ask you a few questions: Do you tell your patients about your passion for high quality dentistry? Does your stationary make this focus clear? Does your website say it? Do your staff say it? You have to be careful to not sound arrogant but there is no reason why this message shouldn't be made clear via these routes. For me it means that all new patients get a new pt pack explaining important points about the practice such as emergency contact details etc, but it also talks about my passion for dentistry. This information can be found on the "Info For Patients" page of my website. My stationary also has a header with my logo and a tagline again highlighting my focus on quality to provide long term outcomes. There are also a few simple tools you can implement when presenting prices to your patients to help them understand the value in the treatment you are recommending. Indirect restorations like crowns and onlays are expensive and justifiably so. They take a lot of time and highly skilled focussed work to prepare well for and a comparably highly skilled technician will want a decent fee for constructing the restoration. In most cases patients don't really care about this though. They are choosing the crown because you say it should be the best way of restoring the tooth to good shape, strength, reliability and aesthetics. Most pts will only want to spend a decent amount of money if they feel it will give good long term value for money. So have you considered explaining the cost to the patient in terms of longevity? You need to choose a timeframe you are happy to quote and then work out the cost per year or month or week. So for instance if you consider the national average cost for a crown is quoted as £500, if you are confident it should last 20 years with good OH then that works out to be less than 50p a week to restore this tooth. Obviously this method only works if you are confident you are actually providing quality work that will last but pts may prefer the idea of explaining it as "50p a week" to rebuild the tooth. Another option you can consider is splitting up your overall cost to explain its different component parts. For instance you can split your crown cost into "lab cost" and "time and materials cost". I used to do this and included is a photo of how I presented this to pts. I have moved away from it because I personally found it sometimes made things more complex than needed but now that I have more time for my consultations I might go back to using a system like this occasionally. PS my prices have also increased since I made that table. If you want to explore this topic more there is a good 30 minute audiobook available for free from the harvard business school via audible here: https://mobile.audible.co.uk/pd/Film-Radio-TV/How-to-Stop-Customers-from-Fixating-on-Price-Audiobook/B00SJWV04G/?ref=msw_search_c1_0_2_AN If you have seen my previous posts you can hopefully see by now that I take great pride in my verbal and written explanations to patients. However it came to my attention very recently that one area this was falling short of the high expectations I set for myself was during exams when discussing all the normal findings. Until just a few weeks ago I tended to keep this to a minimum and just focus on the problems I had found. But I now realise this is a significant oversight. By explaining each stage of your assessment either as you do it or just after sitting the patient up you are highlighting all the things you have just checked, reaffirming how thorough you are and giving the patient the opportunity to comment on each point if they wish.
So now my explanation with patients goes something like this:
After that you make sure the patient understood all that and check to see if they have any questions before going on to give great OHI hopefully using both an OHI postcard and a custom demo model 😉. This process doesn't take long and you should easily have time for it if there are no issues to report but it should hopefully minimise the problem that I know some dentists encounter when patients feel short changed because their exam was only 10 minutes long and the dentist barely talked to them. And it also really helps if there is lots to talk about because you will be used to approaching each topic in a systematic way therefore making it easier to ensure no points are missed. If you are already doing something similar I would love to hear about it. If not then I would suggest you give it a try for yourself. |
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August 2020
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