As practices are struggling to meet patient demand for appointments, Practice Plan regional support manager, Deborah Bell, explains how diary zoning may help relieve some of the pressure on front of house teams.
Right now, I see quite a lot of practices struggling with time. There’s always been an abundance of patients but now there’s been an increase in demand, teams are struggling to accommodate. This is especially the case with NHS practices. We’ve all seen the stories in the national media that NHS dentists just can’t take on patients. These dentists are left wondering, where do we book them? How do we see all these patients?
There are also a lot of patients coming forward and saying, ‘I really need to see a dentist urgently’. Although this is something that predates Covid-19, the time versus patient need tension is becoming a bigger issue. In my experience, zoning diaries can help a lot.
It helped us when I worked in practice. Back then it was just a case of dividing the diary to make sure we were earning the right amount of money each day. Our dentist was very keen on us knowing exactly how much we needed to earn as a business to be viable. He shared that information with us, and so knew we had to hit that amount of money. During a cost-of-living crisis, it’s important to make sure the practice is bringing in the right amount of money.
One of the sessions at Practice Plan’s Dental Business Theatre at the British Dental Conference and Dentistry Show on 12 and 13 May is ‘How can my practice beat the cost-of-living crisis?’ where a panel of experts will offer some answers to this big question.
Why not come along if you’re going to the show?
Know what you need to achieve with diary zoning
To be able to hit our daily financial target, we had to zone our diaries into treatment, examination and emergency slots each day.
So that was the basic setting for zoning. If you’re starting to zone your diary now, then I think the most important thing is to know either a. how many UDAs you need to achieve that day or b. how much money you need to earn if you don’t have a UDA target.
If you have a mixed practice, then obviously it’s a mixed bag of how many UDAs you need to deliver and how much money you need to make.
So, that is the starting point. Once you have that information and have made that decision, you need to share it with your team. Don’t be afraid to do that because your team needs to know.
They’re the people who are booking the patients into the diary and if they don’t know the detail of what they should be putting in to achieve that goal for you, you won’t achieve it.
Vary your slots
Once you’ve started zoning your diary, it’s important to make sure you don’t have days and days of examinations only. If you have too many of these, you might not be able to treat people for six or seven weeks. So, it’s best to ensure that when your recalls go out, they are spread across the diary.
Also, recall slots should be shorter than treatment slots. It’s best to have emergency slots every day so people aren’t just being squeezed in here and there. If you have emergency slots scheduled daily then, if one doesn’t get filled, you can offer it to somebody else. Perhaps to someone who needs seeing quickly but who wouldn’t be considered an emergency. Or, if you have a cancellation list, you could ring somebody on that list and get them seen sooner.
Using the zoning means that whoever on the team is answering the telephone, they can say categorically, ‘Oh, Mrs. Jones, you’d like a check-up? Yes, we have nine o’clock on Tuesday.’ And then when that patient comes out, ‘Treatment? Yes, no problem.
We have a treatment slot at eleven o’clock in two weeks’ time.’ The reception team just needs to know that they have the autonomy to offer those appointments without devaluing that book for you.
You wouldn’t switch on your sat nav and not enter a postcode. You wouldn’t just keep wandering about aimlessly. So, you have to know what you need to achieve by the end of the day, the week, the month, the year even. You need your UDAs across the year or your membership plan targets. If you can’t get your private patients in, then you can’t achieve your targets.
Build in some flex to your diary zoning
It’s something that worked well for us. Although at first, we all thought it wouldn’t go down well with the patients. There are some long-standing patients that always come in at a particular time. There will always need to be a little flex, but you should be able to fit things into your pattern. And once you get that, then you will find that you will be making the right money. You will be hitting your UDA targets.
One of the most frequently asked questions I get from practices is about how to deal with patients who say, ‘Well, if you can see me as a private patient, why can’t you see me on the NHS?’.
If you’ve zoned your diaries you can hand-on-heart say to those patients: ‘Well, we do have designated areas in our diary for NHS and for private to ensure that we are meeting the needs of our patients equally.’
Dividing into sessions
I think the best thing is to decide if you’re going to divide your diary up into sessions. So, you might run an NHS session and a private session. If so, then decide exactly how much you need to achieve out of each.
How many UDAs do you need to do in that NHS session? How many private patients do you need to see to achieve your financial target? That’s got to be the most important thing. You need to know what you’re going to get out of it.
There’s no point just blocking your diary up in pretty colours, you need to know that you’ve got a definite goal in mind. And sometimes you might need somebody to help you with that.
That may mean enlisting the help of your accountant. Or, perhaps looking at your UDAs, seeing how many you have to achieve across the year, then dividing that back into the number of days available.
When it comes to recalls, look at how many you need to see to achieve whatever goal you have set. Also, make sure that your patients are not going to be waiting six weeks for their treatment. It should be around about two to three weeks, if possible.
This may seem difficult to manage at first, but it is absolutely worth it.
If you’d like to work with a membership plan provider who thinks about your needs and supports your business, helping you to find solutions to the things that matter in practice, why not have a chat with Practice Plan on 01691 684165 or visit practiceplan.co.uk/switch to find out how easy it is to join the Practice Plan family.
If you’re going to the Dentistry Show on 12 and 13 May, we’ll be at stand K50, so why not come and have a chat?
