Next Level Hygiene: Introduction
Introduction: For Owners and Managers
The Sympathetic Nervous System:The Silent (Practice) Killer
You try so hard. Everyone is groomed and looking good, there’s great lighting and seating in the waiting room, your Keurig pod selection is shockingly good, and your Wi-fi, well, it doesn’t even have a password. Yet, here in this island of five-star comfort, fight-or-flight rears its ugly head to trouble the human animal you’re about to slap a bib on and poke around inside its mouth. It’s just not fair. To make matters worse, if that human animal isn’t managed, it will fight-or-flight itself into avoiding treatment, or hop from dental clinic to dental clinic, never knowing the reason why. Let’s stop the madness.
Nature is To Blame
Your patients want to love your team. They want to feel comfortable in their care. But once the norepinephrine starts pumping, they are less and less able—not likely, but able––to have a calm, receptive sense of well-being. Once the sympathetic nervous system gets going, they are more vigilant and reactive. They are on the alert for danger signs, so they find more of them. They feel everything more intensely. They can’t help it. It’s the way their body works. They have these negative feelings, whether they want to or not.
Set Reminder: Never Come Back
This sounds bad enough, but here’s why it’s a practice killer: all the while the patient is in this increased state of sensitivity, they are learning. Remembering. They are creating unconscious associations between their negative feelings and your office and team. And these memories are better-formed and more persistent than average ones because the brain is wired such memories of stress or danger are especially persistent and clear.
So all the while the patient is feeling bad, the brain is taking notes so it can make a point to avoid situations like this as much as possible.
So we’re stuck having to work with yet another troublesome feature of the human body. Luckily, we’re professionals in this area. We can handle this.
And we must. Managing this is key to patient satisfaction and practice growth.
What’s Fonzie Like?
The key is to avoid triggering discomforts so that we can help the patient stay far upstream of anxieties, fears, and a hormonally-dictated reality.
This way the patient has plenty of threshold to handle the necessary momentary discomforts of treatment without engaging their survival instincts. This way, they can have a positive experience, and create positive memories and associations with your team and your practice.
They will be able to rationally respond to their treatment plans. They will be more receptive to homecare suggestions— provided you give those suggestions the right way.
It takes some forethought, but it can be done. And, like every other challenge our profession throws at us, it feels great to know how to deal with it predictably, and to reap the benefits of using those insights in our Patient Experience Design.
Addressing Patient Fear Globally: The Four Fears
We have a concept called the Four Fears. These are the four fears a practice has to anticipate in each patient. Psychologically speaking, fear is decreased as trust is increased.
Addressing and overcoming the Four Fears is the objective of a practice’s Patient Experience Design.
As we talk about establishing an empathic connect to improve their comfort, you’ll notice the same linear relationship: as the patient feels more seen, heard, and understood, they feel less uncertain and less fearful. This reduces their nervous response and improves all of the outcomes you both care about.
In many ways, an Empathic Connection is each clinician’s number one tool for making sure that communication is open and each patient’s individual batch of the Four Fears is understood and cared for.
This material is used to help hygienists (or team members in any clinical role) get acquainted with the whys and hows of connecting with patients for the sake of their comfort, well-being, and retention.
We use multiple angles to make the point, and talk about it in terms of their nervous system, their psychological and physical comfort, and their expectations as consumers. This introduction is for you to understand what you’re looking at. The rest of this material is meant to be shared with your team to assist your training efforts.
Team Materials Description
The team training material is as follows:
The Dental World: Team Tools is meant to be used as a printed handout or shared as a pdf ebook. It also works as a visual presentation for a group setting.
An In-Depth Look at Comfortable Treatment is a short pdf that provides a fast walkthrough of the comfort-focused approach. It’s less about rationale and more about what to do. It’s useful as a handout and easily shared as a pdf ebook.
The Four Fears
The Four Fears is our training mnemonic for anticipating and compensating for the universal concerns all patients bring with them to treatment. There is set of graphics useful as individual handouts and as a group presentation, and written material that can either be handed out or used as background to help mentors and managers in their team coaching.
The Dental World Second Supplement goes into more examples and rationale. This is useful for those who are interested in more background, and for mentors and managers to use to help explain the rationale behind the approach to their teams. Print it out or share the pdf.
The Dental World Thought Experiment is an exercise in developing empathy with patients as consumers. This can be done as a handout or, as a discussion centerpiece in a group brainstorm session or quarterly check-in.
These multiple approaches will help to provide detailed background to prepare mentors and managers to handle coaching conversations, and allow you to communicate the approach to your team while supplying memorable repetition, and the improved success in training different personality types.