Patient experience (haircut)

Recently I had a haircut that made me reflect on the patient experience in our surgeries. The haircut was provided by a grumpy old chinese man who seemed to pride himself on getting the customer in and out as fast as possible. I think to him, fast meant good. The haircut was very rushed, minimal communication, he was throwing down the scissors and clipper inserts  and his movements were very fast and forceful. He would turn and tip my head forcefully, went out for a smoke between customers and the force felt from the clippers themselves was quite a bit.

Contrast that to he younger, female hairdresser that was working in the adjacent chair, she moved slowly and purposefully, stopping to appraise the work and reassess the next steps. It may well be that she was less experienced which is why she took longer, but from a customer experience perspective most people would prefer her service.

As we increase in experience, our movements becomes more unconscious and if we add a busy day on top of that, we can tend to be rushed in our movements, give the patient's less breaks and our dentistry may be perceived as rougher. Slow, purposeful movements make us appear calm and in control. Doing things fast means we are more likely to make mistakes that will cost us more time to rectify. You will drop more instruments, have a messier tray table, forget clinical steps etc. Patients have nothing to do when lying down and so they absorb everything in their surroundings. If they sense we are hurried, it hurts their opinion of the quality of our work. Even if the final job is perfectly acceptable, they will perceive the dentistry as low quality because of the time taken to do it.

This is a recurrent problem for me as time pressures get to me easily. I don't like running late nor making the patient wait but it is key that I try to remove this initially by booking an appropriate amount of time with the patient and secondly if I am running late, ignoring the time pressure and focusing my attention on the procedure I am undertaking.