Australasian Dentist Issue 93

CATEGORY 66 AUSTRALASIAN DENTIST Help! I am losing injectable patients to cheaper skin clinics! Dr Giulia D’Anna By Dr Giulia D’Anna, BDSc, MRACDS, Grad. Dip. Derm. Th Cert IV TAE, Grad. Cert laser LINICAL I hear of so many dentists wanting to discount cosmetic injectable treatment within this practice, to try and entice their dental patients into receiving cosmetic injectable treatments from them. Discounting, as you probably know, is a spiral down to the bottom, and dentists need not enter that endless dive. Patients may be tempted by the allure of a cosmetic injectable clinic for many reasons, but you need to remember that they are attending your dental practice to see you for a reason. Use that reason to encompass everything you do. Although I am writing this article with cosmetic injectable clinics in mind, you really can apply this to any cosmetic or dentistry component of your practice. Let’s look at how the patients think Before we talk about the costs of treatment, let’s take a moment to look at things from your patients point of view. The majority of your patients won’t consider themselves a patient. They’ll consider themselves a customer or client, and treatments like Botox and lip fillers are beauty and cosmetic treatments, not medical procedures for cosmetic purposes. We’re not saying this is right or how it should be, but it’s how it is, largely thanks to social media and influencers, the public are trained to think. Both muscle relaxant and dermal filler treatments are very much specialised dental treatments, and you must still look after each patient with a dental exam and treatment plan before performing these treatments. Patients will not necessarily see the connection upfront, until you help them understand it. Patients are sometimes completely unaware of the risks that injectable treatment entail, but also that cheaper clinics are cheaper for a variety of reasons that will deeply change the way treatment and the follow-up will take place. Patients often assume that if someone is offering Botox and fillers, they have been properly trained and assessed, that providers undertake the same protocols and use the same products, no matter what. They assume it wouldn’t be allowed otherwise. But just like so many industries, there are the high turnover – churn them through – kind of clinics, and those that take time to really care and communicate for the patient. It’s not as important to patients If you are anything like me, you live and breathe anatomy and cosmetic injectable treatments. It is literally at the centre of my universe and I am constantly reading a journal, assessing faces everywhere and absorbing information all the time. Again if you are like me, you read a lot about the industry, all of your social media is taken up with posts and pages that are related to skin and cosmetic injectables. You and I think about it a lot, we talk about it a lot, we update our skills and we work with injectables – a lot. Patients are not like us. Patients think about their face. They think about the specific things that bother them – their forehead lines, their crows feet, their thin lips... they don’t have a broad interest in anything other thanwhat they need or want. They don’t care what’s happening with protocols or how you as the practitioner might follow them up. Patients generally don’t feel as passionate about cosmetic injecting industry as you and I do – and they probably never will. In the morning, they might try and fix a facial feature with makeup, but once it becomes something that is time consuming or not fixable, they will seek out a practitioner to ease their pain point. The patient we want Once a patient decides to have treatment – whether it be for their wrinkles, thin lips or whatever, in very simple terms we can divide patients up into two broad groups. There are “Low-cost Lisas ” and “Exclusive Elizabeths”. I know this sounds harsh, but there are some patients that just want work done for the cheapest fee possible, and are not fussed by the details. These are our Lisas . Lisa will scan your website and social media and look for the fee list first. They will travel for the cheapest fee, and are happy to go from clinic to clinic, practitioner to practitioner. They are not worried about quality as a primary consideration, as Lisa believes that all qualifications are the same, all products are the same, and that the fee is the only definitive difference. Elizabeths are quite a different patient. Elizabeth will look at your website, consider the branding and the way it makes her feel. She wants to feel that her money will invest in the best outcomes, so the fee is less important that the clinic, practitioner and the care that she will receive. She will take her time to choose a clinic, but once she trusts the “brand”, she will stay. Elizabeth has a number of key considerations. These include: 1. Branding – The clinic and website needs to look polished