Playbook, dental clinic
Why a dental practice cannot just publish nine to five
A practice does not open and close so much as run sessions. There is a morning list and an afternoon list with a gap between them when the phone is not answered, the hygienist is in on some days and not others, and the last appointment starts well before the door is locked. One pair of numbers gets all of that wrong.
Why this is not the general answer
The handling pattern for opening hours holds across every trade. What follows is the part that does not.
- Reception hours and surgery hours are different things at almost every practice, so somebody ringing at half past one is usually finding that nobody answers rather than that the practice is shut.
- The last examination of the day starts long before closing, because a check up needs its own block and the surgery has to be turned round afterwards, so a closing time given as an availability answer sends people to a locked door.
- The hygienist commonly works a subset of the week, which makes are you open on a Thursday and can I see the hygienist on a Thursday two questions with two different answers.
- A Saturday or an early evening session often exists for a limited purpose such as emergencies or working patients, and describing it as ordinary opening produces somebody arriving for a routine check on a day that runs a different list.
How it arrives
- what time does the practice open
- is the hygienist in on a friday
- are you open on saturday morning
- what time is the last appointment
- do you close for lunch
- are you open between christmas and new year
What has to be indexed for this to work
| Session times rather than opening times | The morning and afternoon lists for each day and what happens in the gap between them. Write it the way the rota is written, because that is what decides when somebody can actually be seen. |
|---|---|
| Which service runs on which day | The days the hygienist is in, which sessions each dentist covers, whether a therapist has a list of their own. Publish the service and the day, not personal rota detail you would not want quoted back. |
| The last appointment of each session | The latest start for an examination and the latest start for a longer treatment session. They are different, and the difference is the whole answer for somebody ringing at ten past four. |
| Closures as dated entries | Bank holidays, training days, any shutdown over Christmas, and the emergency arrangement for each. A generic note about bank holidays ages quietly into a wrong answer. |
The reply
We run a morning and an afternoon session, and reception is not on the phone in the gap between them, so the times on our hours page are the ones to plan around [1]. The hygienist is not in every day, so if that is who you need, check the days listed there before travelling [2]. I cannot see the diary, so for the last appointment on a particular day it is worth ringing.
It corrects the model before answering, because somebody expecting a shop will be surprised by a midday gap that has nothing to do with staff breaks. The hygienist gets a sentence of its own, since the wasted trip here is always the same wasted trip. And it does not claim to know today or to know whether a slot exists.
Where it stops
The trigger. The visitor asks whether they can still be seen today, or whether there is anything left this afternoon.
That is a question about the diary rather than about our hours, and I cannot see it. Please ring reception, and if we are closed, use the emergency details on this page.
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 open right now, because there is no reliable sense of the time where the visitor is.
- Never imply a named dentist or the hygienist is in today, since that is a rota fact that changes week to week.
- Never treat the closing time as the time of the last appointment.
- Never describe an emergency or Saturday session as ordinary opening, because the list run on it is not the same.
Questions
- Do we really need to publish the lunchtime gap?
- Yes, because it is the commonest reason somebody says nobody answers the phone. A published gap is a fact about how a practice runs. An unpublished one reads as a practice that ignores calls.
- How do we stop the Christmas closure going stale?
- Point the assistant at the hours page you maintain rather than uploading a copy, and put the dates on that page. It quotes what is published, so the fix is editorial rather than technical.
- Can it tell somebody the next free appointment?
- No. It cannot see availability of any kind. It can say which sessions exist and which days the service they want runs, which absorbs most of the calls that were really hours questions.
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 opening hours in generalHolidays, seasonal variation, last orders and multiple sites. Keeping one source of truth so the assistant and your map listing agree.
- Nine on a Friday, and somebody types that a filling has come outA Friday night message about a broken tooth is not asking when you open. What the assistant has to surface before anything else.
- Getting a patient from the bus stop to the chairThe step at the front, the surgeries upstairs and where to leave the car. Arrival detail a practice has usually never written down.
- 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.
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.