Playbook, dental clinic
Getting a patient from the bus stop to the chair
A great many practices sit in a converted terrace or above a shop, with a door between two other doors, a step, a narrow hall and the surgeries on the first floor. None of that is on a map. Writing down the last two hundred metres is one of the cheapest improvements available to a practice, and hardly any have done it.
Why this is not the general answer
The handling pattern for location and parking holds across every trade. What follows is the part that does not.
- A practice is usually one door in a row of them, often with residential entrances either side and a sign smaller than the shopfront next to it, so a visual description of the door matters more than the postcode.
- Patients arrive with a numb face, after sedation, or with a child in tow, which makes the walk from a parking space a different consideration here than for somebody nipping into a shop.
- Where the surgeries are upstairs the arrival answer has to say so unprompted, because a patient who cannot manage stairs needs to know before they have paid for parking.
- A high street practice usually has no car park at all, so the useful answer is which public car park, the maximum stay on it, and whether that stay covers the appointment they are booked for.
How it arrives
- where do i park for the dentist
- is the practice up a flight of stairs
- which door is it i am outside and cannot see a sign
- how long can i park on the high street
- which bus goes past the practice
- can someone drop me off outside
What has to be indexed for this to work
| The last two hundred metres, written as a description | Which shop it is next to, the colour of the door, whether the entrance is round the side, which bell to press. Patients stand outside and type this, so write it for somebody looking at the building. |
|---|---|
| Parking with the maximum stay attached | The nearest car park, what it costs, the time limit, and any on street restriction. Tie it to appointment length, because an hour of parking and a ninety minute treatment session is a problem worth flagging in advance. |
| The route inside the building | How many steps at the door, whether there is a handrail, whether the surgeries are upstairs, and whether a ground floor surgery exists. Written as a route somebody can picture rather than as a claim. |
| Bus routes and the nearest station by name | The actual services and stops, and how long the walk is from each. Nearby transport links is not something a patient can act on. |
The reply
We are on the high street between the two shops named on our contact page, and the door is the narrow one with the practice sign above it [1]. There is no practice car park; the nearest public one is listed there and it has a maximum stay, so check that against how long your appointment is booked for [2]. The surgeries are on the first floor and there is a step at the front door, so if that is a difficulty please ring ahead and reception will tell you what can be arranged.
It describes the door instead of repeating an address the visitor already has. The parking answer carries the time limit in the same breath as the location, which is what turns a fine into a non event. And the step and the stairs are volunteered rather than waited for, because that is the only version somebody can plan around.
Where it stops
The trigger. The visitor needs something arranged for their arrival: a space kept, help at the door, a ground floor surgery, or a drop off at a particular time.
That needs somebody to agree it rather than a page to answer it. Leave me your name, an email and what you need, and reception will come back to you before your appointment.
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 the practice is accessible without describing the actual route, since the step and the staircase are what is being asked about.
- Never say parking is free without naming the maximum stay in the same sentence.
- Never guess which surgery a patient will be in, because a ground floor room is arranged by reception rather than by a page.
- Never give directions to a branch or a site the material does not cover.
Questions
- We have no parking at all. Is that worth saying?
- It is one of the most useful sentences on your site. A patient who knows to allow ten minutes for the car park arrives on time, and a practice running a tight list gets that ten minutes back.
- Should the stairs be mentioned every time?
- Whenever the question is about getting here, yes. It is not a negative when it arrives with what you do about it, and it is a serious problem when somebody discovers it at the door.
- Can it give directions from where the patient is standing?
- No, it is not a mapping service and should not try to build a route. It repeats the arrival description you publish, which is precisely the thing a map cannot supply.
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 location and parking in generalWhich entrance, where to park, the step free route, the nearest stop. Genuinely useful information that is almost never written down well.
- Routing a dental complaint without touching the clinical partPractice complaints procedures are written and staged. What may be acknowledged, and why the treatment itself must never be discussed.
- Plan, insurance or paying at the desk: three different answersA capitation plan is not insurance, and neither decides what a claim pays. What to publish about plans, claim forms and authorisation.
- Somebody wants a price in writing before they have been seenA dental estimate is a document issued after an examination, not a figure from a chat window. How to explain the way one is produced.
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.