Get the Dish

Does this sound familiar? :

You have an excellent hygiene team – great!

You also have top-of-the-line equipment to give your patients great treatment – awesome!

Yet you can’t seem to be making much profit from your hygiene department – not good at all.

Here’s a video that can help:

So what do you do when you find yourself in this situation? Well, the first step to solving any problem is identifying the root causes of it. Dissecting every aspect of your team and service will help you pinpoint areas of trouble.

Modern Hygienist recently featured a great article by a hygiene colleague, Mary Lynn Wheaton, regarding some of the best ways to create a profitable hygiene department.

She says the following miss-steps contribute to the perception that a hygiene department is unprofitable:

• Lack of hygienists fully utilizing their skills
• No soft tissue management program grounded in the philosophy of the practice
• Low fees
• Patient commitment and compliance issues
• Lack of verbal skills utilized by the dental team
• Little statistical measurement or knowledge of what are the acceptable range norms for the hygiene department

This is a great analysis of areas to improve on!

Take the time to ask yourself if and how much improvement is needed in each one of these additional areas. As you know, the hygiene department is an extremely important part of dentistry, so stress that importance whenever possible.

Show the value of your hygiene team in everything you do. One of the most important suggestions on this list is having open, friendly, effective communication with your patients. Once you build trust with them and help them understand how important hygiene is to maintaining their overall health.

For more great information on how you can improve your practice with dental coaching, Stephanie Lodding has some of her amazingly helpful talks here.

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