DENTAL PRACTICE RESOURCES
This section provides a suite of resources for dentists designed to help you with the day-to-day running of an effective, successful dental practice. This section will be regularly updated with new materials and research on a variety of topics.
These leaflets are PDF documents formatted to print out to standard letter size and they can be printed double-sided.
Patient motivation and communication
The articles available to download below provide an overview of the issues relating to patient motivation and the importance of effective communication, and suggest practical advice relevant to dental practitioners.
Understanding patient motivation I – Why don’t patients always follow advice?
Dispensing advice about patients’ oral health is part of your everyday role. But do you sometimes feel your words are falling on deaf ears? Here we explain why patients do not always follow advice, and why ‘concordance’ is a more effective approach to motivate patients.
Understanding patient motivation II – Influencing behavioural change: strategies for success.
How easy is it to motivate your patient to modify their behaviour? Key learnings from psychology offer some insights into managing behavioural change and this article explores how some of these approaches may be helpful for dental practitioners to inspire action.
Getting your message across I – Why does communication sometimes fail?
Failures in communication can be common and it is all too easy to criticise the recipient of the message as failing to understand. Here we highlight some barriers that may exist between dental practitioners and patients, and explain the areas where confusion might arise.
Getting your message across II – What makes your patients tick?
How humans interact and how they receive and process information is a complex process. Leading psychologists have provided some useful techniques to help you understand what makes your patients tick, and we explain how adapting your approach can help you get your message across.
Getting your message across III – Top tips for successful communication.
Good communication is an intuitive process for some people. For others effective communication is not so straightforward and this skill needs to be acquired. Find out how to avoid confusion when talking to patients and learn about some of the different communication methods that can help ease the process.
Improving your dental practice – Creating a ‘great’ team.
The process of creating a professional, happy, efficient team from a collection of capable individuals has many facets. Here we present top 10 practical, real-life steps to creating a great dental care team.
Spreading the word – How do you promote a dental practice?
Like any successful business, modern dental practices need to reach out, engage with their communities and build up local trade. Here we explain how you can market your business effectively, and how the use of print advertising, direct mail, public relations and the internet will attract new customers and create loyal patients.
Towards a child-friendly practice I – Communicating with children
One of the toughest aspects of dental practice is working with difficult, challenging or uncooperative patients. Children, more often than we would like, are represented in this group. Here we discuss why a dental visit may be an unpleasant experience for some children and offer some top tips that could be adopted to help ease, and maximise the effectiveness of, the communication process.
Towards a child-friendly practice II – Strategies for success
Regular visits to dentists and dental hygienists are essential in helping children prepare for future dental visits. However, if children hold a negative view of a dental experience, they may dislike or may even become frightened of future dental visits. In this article find out various tactics that can be successfully used to make the dental experience as pleasant for children as possible.