I’ve been co-presenting a wonderful FOH Development programme with the legend Chris Barrow. Last week we delivered week 5, which covered Dental speak and triage.
It occurred to me as we prepared content for the training session that it really is in so many cases a lack of communication between clinicians and FOH/Reception or PMs that can cause that black cloud to follow us all round the practice all day.
Clinicians sometimes expect FOH to be as clinical as them, FOH sometimes don’t understand how a clinician wants FOH to manage their diaries, and quite often FOH are not aware of what goes on beyond the surgery door.
Its so important that all work systems are approached as a team, and clinicians assist FOH to produce a triage protocol for urgent patients and some basic dos and don’ts, otherwise they cant expect a steady diary that is set up to avoid scheduling or timing problems.
Work as a team, produce a list of questions for FOH to ask to guide them to scheduling the most appropriate appointment. Tell them how long is required for the predicted appointments. FOH are not there to guess a diagnosis but I promise that if you work together that black cloud won’t lurk half as much and you can all go about your day much more calmly.
Interestingly the word triage is derived from the French word “trier”, which means to sort or select. Its historic roots for medical purposes go back to napoleon when triaging large groups of wounded soldiers was necessary. Thankfully we don’t have wounded soldiers, but dental practices are experiencing huge numbers of patients needing urgent care due to COVID.
In addition to triage, we also talked about certain communications and sometimes having to adjust what we want to say to what is acceptable to say, and the way some patients think…. needless to say, we had some laughs along the way.
A little bit of tongue in cheek dental speak humour…
- What terms should we try to avoid using: “Right, lets give this a try shall we”?
- Managing patients’ expectations: “Make me look like Keith Duffy please”.
- When a patient challenges cost: “is that your best price?”
- What should clinicians do to support FOH? “You’ve just bean extremely rude to Michelle on reception and now you’ve entered the surgery like butter wouldn’t melt”.
- How do you approach a conversation regarding a child’s grotty mouth, without offending mum or dad? “Has granny been buying you rubbish again?”
- How can we manage patient’s anxiety better? “Can you pass me the extra big forceps please Connie?”
- How do you get patients to take ownership of their problems? “Well done on growing those caries, super job”
- How long is my treatment guaranteed for? “can you please just get your crystal ball out?”
- “Why do you need to take X-Rays? – my last dentist never needed to, he was great”.
- Now I realise these two may be a little controversial but anyway……
- “I think my amalgams are causing me to crave sugar”
- “Do you do holistic dentistry?”