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The Dental Hygienist has a pivotal role in the health and success of the dental practice.

Having a fully functional hygiene department ADDS  to the success of the dental office in so many ways.

There are some countries and some regions where dentists prefer to do their own hygiene on their dental patients, rather than employ a dental hygienist.

To me it doesn’t make sense.

Why would a dentist be doing his own hygiene?

A hygienist will work on patients at around $AUD50.00 per hour.

While the hygienist is cleaning patients’ teeth, the dentist can then be doing restorative work on other patients at anywhere between $AUD300.00 and $AUD1300.00 per hour [or more].

I remember one of my clients who was so busy, that his schedule was booked some two months in advance.

If a patient called for an appointment they had to wait two months before they could be seen by this dentist.

On close analysis of the doctor’s schedule we found that the doctor was spending over twelve hours each week doing thirty minute hygiene appointments.

This dentist was so busy cleaning teeth that he had no time to be seeing his own patients who needed to see him for important restorative work that he was diagnosing at the check-up appointments.

By practicing in this manner it was very difficult for this doctor to create urgency and concern about the conditions he was discovering and the treatment that he was recommending.

This LACK OF urgency and concern resulted in patients cancelling and delaying their diagnosed treatment.

And sometimes patients who were concerned went elsewhere to have their treatment done because they didn’t want to wait the two months.

The practice was a red hot mess.

And all because the doctor believed that HIS PATIENTS only wanted HIM to be cleaning their teeth.

And not anybody else.

On close examination I recommended to the doctor that he employ a dental hygienist to do the regular six-month hygiene visits for his patients.

And the hygiene visits would be sixty minutes long instead of thirty minutes.

But at the same fee.

This would create three hours each day for the doctor to see his restorative patients.

The hygienist would have six hours of scheduled hygiene each day, and would also have two hours available each day to see new patients to the practice as well as those patients of the practice who required deeper cleaning or maybe even a second visit because it had “been a while” between visits.

Why Your Regular Patients Will Love Your Dental Hygienist.

My wife said, having her teeth cleaned by a hygienist was just like having a  facial.

She said it was gentle and relaxing.

Dental hygienists are very proud of their work. 

They have two people to please.

They need to please the patient and they also need to please the dentist.

Patients LOVE the way that hygienists “take their time”  with their appointment. There is no rush rush rush, like when the dentist does their cleaning.

What else?

One of the real advantages of employing a dental hygienist is that the hygienist can identify any areas of concern that she sees during the cleaning appointment, and bring those concerns to the attention of the dentist when the dentist arrives to do the dental examination.

A good hygienist will also share those areas of concern with the patient so that the patient has a “heads up” about those areas, and what the dentist may possibly recommend.

A really good hygienist will take all photos and all necessary radiographs and have those ready for the dentist when he arrives to do his examination. They will have explained their findings to the patient before the doctor arrives.

And this means?

It’s kind of funny, but the patient tends to “trust” the opinion of the hygienist.

So when the dentist arrives to do the dental examination, if conducted correctly, it tends to be more of a re-confirmation of all the things that the hygienist has raised.

So long as the dentist and the hygienist are “on the same page”.

The end result?

Exams for the dentist tend to take a lot less time, and are more a CONFIRMATION of the hygienists findings rather than a DISCOVERY of things not ever discussed.

For my client, the end result was that his dental practice went from collections of less than $60K per month to collections of $150K per month in the space of twenty months.

Of course, there were some other small tweaks we made in that dental office that really skyrocketed his results.

If you’d like to know what else I did to create these results, and how I can help you do the same, or EVEN BETTER,  then email me david@theUPE.com and put the word “SKYROCKET” in the subject line. 

There is a better way….

Sometimes we don’t know what we don’t know.

I’ve also worked with dental offices where the dentists are so high and mighty  about their role in hygiene that the whole office ends up being a RABBLE.

And that’s being polite.

There’s a reason why the Yellow Brick Road was yellow. It was to keep Dorothy on track as to where she needed to go.

Otherwise “THE WIZARD OF OZ”  might have ended up as a mini-series…. or worse still, as a long running soap opera….

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Make sure you subscribe to my monthly Dental Water Cooler Podcast Series…. “The Ultimate Patient Experience”

Click on this link for all details

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My next public speaking presentation showing Dentists how to grow their Dental practices will be in Sydney on November 9-10 and in Melbourne on November 12-13 with Dr Christopher Phelps, Dr Nathan Jeal, Mr Alex Lalovic and Mr Tiger Safarov.

For more information and to secure your seat click this link here.

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Have you read my book , How To Build The Dental Practice of Your Dreams [Without Killing Yourself!] In Less Than Sixty Days.

You can order your copy here: Click Link To Order

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The Ultimate Patient Experience is a simple to build complete Customer Service system in itself that I developed that allowed me to create an extraordinary dental office in an ordinary Sydney suburb. If you’d like to know more, ask me about my free special report.

Email me at david@theupe.com