Most of our fears, including the fear of the dental office, are deeply rooted in our childhood.  If you were a child of the 60‘s or 70‘s, that fear may have been borne of methods that were taught in dental school, such as HOM (hand-over-mouth).  Whether it’s an outdated patient management technique, the needle, or the sound of the drill, these childhood experiences can have psychological sequelae that can last a lifetime.

Although the techniques of old are far less prevalent these days, there are still things that a practitioner one can do to enhance the childhood dental experience.  Today, parents are generally more informed and concerned about their children’s dental health, and as such are more aware of the importance of regular dental visits.

The following are some ‘kid friendly’ things that you can do in your office to make it more suited to children’s need:

Update Your Waiting Room

If possible, the waiting room should be either a specific room or designated area for children to play in that is safe and visible to parents and staff.  A few things that you might consider adding to your waiting room to make it fun and distracting for kids:

• Television (with a healthy number of cartoon channels or DVDs of some children’s movies)
• Toys of various kinds – puzzles, Rubik’s Cube™, build-a-block etc. Anything that keeps their minds active
• Comic books and illustrated story books
• Chairs or furnishings that are smaller sized for children.

Distractions in the Operatory

The general child-friendly atmosphere that you built in the waiting room should continue into the operatory.  If you have many young clients, consider the following ‘op features’:

• A smaller dental chair, in which the child will feel more comfortable.
• TVs attached to the ceiling. Nothing more distracting than a child’s favourite show or movie in their view while undergoing a dental procedure.
-Engage your young clients. Talk to the child about casual topics like school and play. Try to win their trust and respect their opinion. Children like to know that their opinion is being considered for grown up matters.
•  Tell, Show, Do.  During the procedure, include them in it and explain to them the various steps being taken, before following through on a particular step of the procedure.

If a child is particularly nervous, you may wish to have the parents present during the visit (although, this can be a double-edged sword, particularly if the parent themselves is an anxious dental patient).

The Treasure Box…Happy Endings


Make a lasting impression at the end of the visit. Have a range of small gifts to reward children for their good behaviour. This also acts as an incentive to remind them they had a good visit.  To emphasize the ‘reward for good behaviour’, you can offer a sugar-free or healthy snack. Play small games or quiz the child on basics of dental hygiene and gift him or her for the right answer. You can even create suspense by promising an even bigger gift if they come with clean teeth for their next dental visit.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, do not patronize young patients, and do make sure that the office staff are well trained to deal with them.  A well trained staff that can manage and deal with an anxious child, that can help the child to calm themselves before the dental checkup, are an important part of making the experience as pleasant as possible.

The BiteBank Patient Education Library is rich with content that features information about procedures, techniques, definitions, services, images, and videos. This information not only provides your patients a trusted resource to educate themselves, but can help them to understand simple to complex treatment plans that may require multiple treatment options. The resources of the Library are available to our dentists to add to their websites, providing anxious patients a chance to understand their oral health issues they may be facing, or to prepare them for a procedure that they may soon be undergoing in your practice.

BiteBank offers its basic patient education content in every plan to make sure this valued information reaches your patients through your website. The multilingual content provides every dentist with the base line from which to add, modify, or to create more unique content, rather than starting from scratch (which ultimately is the hardest and most time consuming part of creating a website for any busy practitioner). With our easy to use content editor, its as simple as adding your own information to modify or expand upon the content that is already provided. So, its easy to get your site up live, quickly, with full-site content.

Customizing that content to your practice specifics will help you have better ranking in search engines. The BiteBank content editor also gives you easy fields in which to change the meta information that is hidden on each website page, information that is used by search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo! to help index your website.

Our dental video offerings are also available as a multi-media option to help educate your patients on the procedures that you are offering. This is a more exclusive feature in the Master Plan, but is available as an option on any other plan. The videos are excellent multi-media visual aids, with lifelike animations and demonstrations of procedures and oral health maintenance techniques. Using a tablet device or a computer in the operatory, you can access your own website to show patients a particular video of a procedure from the comfort of the dental chair. An educated patient makes it easier for them to understand and accept comprehensive dental treatments that may otherwise take far more time to explain.

BiteBank Websites….feature-rich, customizable, and educational dental websites that work to enhance your practice visibility and brand!

It Starts Here!™

www.bitebankwebsites.com

1-888-575-7932

This past Friday September 14th,  we received amazing cupcakes from Hanapole Dental Care!
On behalf of the whole BiteBank Team, Thank You!

In a world that is reacting with greater positivity to Eco-friendly business processes, Dentists have an opportunity to support earth-friendly habits while increasing the profile of their practices. The scale of business and clinical operations in a dental practice leaves ample scope for “going green”.

With that in mind, here are just some of the items to check off your ‘going green’ list, helping make your practice ‘greener’ without compromising on patient or staff safety.

Here are ten ways that a dentist can impress and exceed the expectations of their patients.

1) Be aware of anxiety related to pain
Understandably, this is the most important factor for a majority of dental patients. Although pain or discomfort is an unavoidable reality in many procedures, a successful dentist needs to understand and soothe anxieties related to pain.