Australasian Dentist Issue 92

CATEGORY 122 AUSTRALASIAN DENTIST D ear Dr Toni, We’ve had to hire some recent graduate dentists rather than experienced ones. What are your tips for mentoring them? Dr RF, ACT. Young dentists often need work on clinical skills, treatment planning, and communication skills. Even the ones who topped their classes at university often don’t realise that patients in private practice don’t say “Yes” to treatment plans just because the diagnosis is clinically correct. I’m also hearing reports that recent graduates need a little more direction because they have been restricted in the hands-on live patients they could learn on at uni for the last two years. To get the most out of recent graduates, youmust set aside time tomentor them. You need to make the investment in your time and give them guidance. To help structure the mentoring, it’s a good idea to develop your own clinical guidelines for your dentists (e.g. under what circumstances do you refer out for perio? Under what circumstances do you recommend crowns rather than fillings?). These guidelines are useful for consistency across all clinicians in the practice. Here’s a step-by-step process for the mentoring. Firstly, make sure that their basic clinical work meets your own clinical standards. If they’ve worked somewhere else before your practice, you can check their clinical references, including asking any specialists to whom they referred work, or the lab technicians who did their lab work. Ask if there’s anything they saw that worried them! In your practice, check on how they’re doing straightforward restorative work, and not only make sure that the restoration is good, but keep an eye on the amount of time they’re taking to do it. Patients don’t want to spend an extra half an hour in the chair just so the dentist can get their margins perfect! Discuss any tips you BEST PRACTICES Q&A BEST PRACTICES Q&A with Dr Toni Surace 4 Dr Toni Surace BDSC (Melb) Managing Director, Momentum Management Mentor, coach and international presenter. It’s always best practice to develop business skills, systems, techniques and industry knowledge that could impact your practice. BEST PRACTICES Q&A is a forum allowing you to ask the tough questions to Australasian Dentist columnist Dr Toni Surace. have for speeding up if it’s necessary. One way of doing this is to nurse for them! It’s also a good idea to put your experienced, trustworthy DAs with the inexperienced dentist so that you can get honest, useful feedback. (Note: be transparent about this so that everyone understands that the DAs role is to be supportive, not to spy!) Secondly, audit their patient records. Take some records at random, check the charting, X-rays, notes etc, and ensure that the dentist has identified treatment consistently with your clinical guidelines. Make time to meet with them weekly and discuss anything you’ve seen in their records that concerns you, and give some positive reinforcement about what you’re seeing that you like. It’s useful for them to know their being watched! Also, ask them to bring you cases they want help with and give them support to improve their skills. Thirdly, ask them to tell you the clinical areas in which they need more practice, and work out a plan for them to shadow you when you next do that type of treatment. You need to show them that it’s safe for them to ask for help, and you’d rather help them develop their skills than have them feel that they can’t approach them. When it comes to treatment planning, you can use some of these steps to help them improve their treatment planning as well as their clinical work. Audit their records for treatment plans and discuss plans with them. You can also get them to bring you any treatment plans they want help with. If you have multiple dentists in your practice, you can set up clinical meetings where everyone gets together and discusses cases. This works well if your practice culture is set up to be collegial rather than competitive. Your effectiveness in mentoring them in communication depends on your own ability to communicate well! If you’re good at getting comprehensive treatment plans accepted, the associate can watch you do it. However, it will save you time and possibly get better results if you send them to experts. Momentum is running support courses this year for dentists who need support, so please let me know how I can help. D ear Dr Toni, We’ve been really busy over the last 18 months, but I’m starting to worry about what happens when the borders open again. What are your thoughts? Dr AR, Vic. I completely understand where you’re coming from! We have no way of knowing exactly when borders will open and how quickly people will get back to the “dental tourism” habit. The smart practices are embedding systems now that will help them if things change. Make sure that you’re rebooking your patients for their next appointments (including 6-month preventative care appointments). Do this by teaching your patients to value their dentistry; make sure they understandwhat’s in it for themto keep dentistry regular rather than waiting until things have gone badly wrong and have become unnecessarily expensive. They can be shown the true value of prevention when you understand how to find out what they care about. If you’re doing comprehensive exams and planning patients’ dentistry with them, there will probably be a lot of work that you can get them to commit to now, before it occurs to them to wait until they go back to Thailand (or wherever they want to go). The trick is to show them the value of getting work done soon, and make sure that you can plan their finances with them. If they do start to talk to you about getting work done overseas, maybe you can say something like: “Wow, after this long of being stuck here in Australia, I wouldn’t want to spend my holiday getting dentistry done! Are you sure that’s what you want to do with your first overseas holiday?!” Keep the tone light and non-judgemental! It’s impossible to prevent a certain “ “