Playbook, dental clinic
Passing a dental visitor to a person the moment a symptom appears
The person who needs a human here is not frustrated with the chat. They are in pain, they typed quickly, and the symptom is often in the last clause of a message that started out administrative. Everything depends on catching it there.
Why this is not the general answer
The handling pattern for asking for a person holds across every trade. What follows is the part that does not.
- The trigger in dentistry is usually a symptom buried inside an otherwise ordinary message, so it has to be caught mid sentence rather than at the start of a conversation.
- The person needing the handover is in discomfort rather than annoyed, so the reply has to be short and end in a telephone number instead of a form with fields in it.
- Dental problems have their own out of hours route, separate from the general emergency route, and naming the wrong one wastes somebody's evening.
- The assistant is not deciding that a symptom is serious enough to escalate, it is declining to make that judgement at all, which is a different behaviour from escalating a difficult question.
How it arrives
- can i speak to a dentist
- my filling has fallen out can someone call me
- i have a swelling under my jaw who do i talk to
- is there someone i can actually speak to
- my tooth is throbbing and i cannot sleep
- i need to talk to somebody about my treatment
What has to be indexed for this to work
| The practice number and when it is answered | Written where the assistant can quote it exactly, including any difference between the reception line and a line kept for urgent calls. |
|---|---|
| Your dental out of hours arrangement | Who covers you when the practice is closed, and the number to ring. This is the detail most often missing from a practice site, and it is the one the assistant needs most. |
| Where an enquiry lands and who reads it | The address the message form sends to, and how often it is checked. If nobody watches it in the evening, the wording must not imply anybody does. |
| What reception can deal with without the dentist | So the assistant knows which requests genuinely need a clinician and which only need somebody to pick up the phone. |
The reply
I am not able to help with pain or with anything to do with a symptom, and I would not want to guess at it. Please ring the practice on the number at the top of this page, and if we are closed the out of hours details are there too [1]. If you would rather somebody called you back, give me your name, an email and a short note and it goes straight to the team.
It refuses first, without hedging or half answering. The phone route comes before the form, because somebody in discomfort should not be filling in fields, and the callback is offered as a fallback rather than as the main answer, so nobody sits waiting for an email that will not arrive tonight.
Where it stops
The trigger. Any message naming pain, swelling, bleeding, a lost filling, a knocked out tooth or a reaction after treatment, however casually it is worded and however far into the sentence it appears.
That needs the practice rather than me. Please call the number above now, or the out of hours service if we are closed, and I will not try to advise on it.
It stops answering before it guesses, says who will pick it up, and asks for the one thing that makes a reply possible. Nothing about it reads as a dead end.
Never say this here
Out of bounds
- Never say how urgent a dental symptom is, or how long it could safely wait.
- Never suggest a painkiller, a mouthwash, clove oil or any measure at home.
- Never say that the dentist will call back, because who calls and when is reception's decision.
- Never ask a triage question such as how bad the pain is, since collecting the answer implies somebody will assess it.
Questions
- Should it ask any follow up questions first?
- No. A follow up question about a symptom looks like the beginning of an assessment, and the practice does not want to be seen to have started one in a chat window.
- What if the message is mostly administrative?
- The symptom wins. Treat the whole message as clinical the moment one appears, answer nothing else, and give the number. The administrative half can wait.
- Where does the caution setting come into this?
- A more cautious setting makes it refuse rather than reach for a loosely matching page, which is what you want here. Combined with a fallback message that names your out of hours route, an ambiguous message ends with the patient looking at the right number.
Keep reading
- Everything for a dental clinicThe questions a dental practice actually gets, the ones that must reach a clinician, and the documents worth indexing first.
- Handling asking for a person in generalThe design question at the centre of a support assistant. Offer early, offer once, collect what a reply needs, promise a time you can keep.
- A patient wants to move their appointment. Which one is it?Which dental appointments can be moved, why a crown fit is harder to shift than a check up, and what may be said about notice.
- Three dental waiting lists, and what can be said about eachThe funded list, the short notice cancellation list and the orthodontic wait are three different queues, and only one is good news.
- Why a dental practice cannot just publish nine to fiveA practice runs sessions, not office hours. What to publish about the lunchtime gap, hygienist days and the Saturday list.
Try it on your own material
Upload a document or point it at your site, paste one line of HTML, then ask it something only your business could answer.