What Are Your Patient Conversations Teaching You?

22 Sep What Are Your Patient Conversations Teaching You?

Patient communication in dentistry happens hundreds of times every year, often in conversations that feel completely ordinary at the time. Some are about pain, others about uncertainty, and some are about whether a patient should choose a £200 treatment or a £10,000 treatment. But when the patient leaves the room, something slightly strange happens because most of the conversation disappears.

We make our notes and remember the clinical decision, perhaps we remember something unusual the patient said, but the conversation itself? Gone.

I’ve become increasingly interested in what we’re losing, because every patient conversation contains information not just about the patient, but about us:

• What happened when the patient hesitated?
• What did we do when they disagreed?
• When they said, “That’s more than I expected,” did we explain the fee, freeze or become curious about what they meant?
• When we made a recommendation, did the alternatives still feel genuinely available?
• When the patient said yes or no, did we know what they had actually understood?
• A YES doesn’t prove they understood.
• A NO doesn’t prove you failed.

None of this is about catching dentists doing something wrong, quite the opposite. Most clinicians I know are trying very hard to communicate well. The problem is that it is extraordinarily difficult to observe yourself while simultaneously examining a patient, diagnosing, explaining, managing time, thinking clinically and running a surgery.

So perhaps one of the greatest untapped opportunities in dentistry isn’t teaching clinicians more things to say, it’s helping us notice more of what is already happening.That’s the idea behind something we’ve been building called Unpack.Not another script, a score, another communication course, or software designed to make more patients say yes. Unpack is being built around a much simpler question:

What are your conversations teaching you? 

Because, perhaps dentistry has been measuring the wrong thing and because patients have always been some of healthcare’s greatest teachers, we’ve just never been very good at keeping the lessons. If we stop obsessing with measuring the yes we can start understanding how the decision was made.

We’re currently testing Unpack with a small group of dentists before opening it more widely. If you’re curious about what you might discover from your own patient conversations, join the Limited Unpack Early Access list, 24 places available.