Lisa Bainham explains why focusing on the patient journey and team communication makes dental team development an investment in better patient experiences, fewer complaints and a stronger practice culture.
If you gave me a blank page and asked me to design the perfect team development day, I’d give you exactly this: half a day on the patient journey, half a day on team communication and behaviours. Two topics, and I’ll admit it, two of my favourites.
Notice what’s missing from that list. Complaint handling. Not because it doesn’t matter, but because, let’s be honest, complaint handling is what happens when the other two go wrong. Get the patient journey right and get the team talking to each other properly, and complaints don’t disappear entirely (patients are human, life happens) but the volume of them, the ones rooted in nothing more than a missed moment or a clumsy word, drops away. Complaint handling is damage control. The first half of the day and the second half are prevention. I know which one I’d rather spend my time on.
First half: the patient journey
Good dental teams can recite their patient journey in their sleep: enquiry, arrival, treatment, checkout, follow-up. Five stages, textbook simple. What most teams have never done is stop and actually look at it, not as a process on a page, but as a lived experience, moment by moment, through the eyes of someone who’s nervous, running late, or dreading the bill.
Every practice has its hot spots, the moments where the team quietly, consistently, knocks it out of the park. The receptionist who remembers a patient hates the smell of mint and has the alternative ready. The nurse who notices someone’s hands are shaking and slows everything down without making a fuss about it. The follow-up call that isn’t a script being read at someone, but an actual human checking in.
‘It’s attention, it’s warmth, it’s noticing’
Here’s the uncomfortable bit: none of that costs a penny. Ask any room full of dental professionals to describe the best customer experience they’ve ever had, anywhere, any industry, and you’ll get the same list every time. Felt welcomed. Was listened to. Wasn’t rushed. Nobody made me feel stupid for asking. Somebody followed up afterwards. Not one of those involves a discount, an upgrade, or new equipment. It’s attention, it’s warmth, it’s noticing. And your team is already capable of every single one of them. The question is whether they’re doing it consistently, or only when the stars align.
Then there are the potholes. The hesitant, ‘I think it might be possible to fit you in…’ instead of a confident offer of two actual appointment times. The apologetic mumble about cost instead of a clear, calm explanation of what’s included. The ‘let me ask someone’ that tells a patient, in three words, that nobody at the front desk actually knows what’s going on. Nobody’s rude, nobody’s shouting, which is exactly why these moments are so dangerous. It’s death by a thousand small, forgettable interactions, and most patients won’t tell you they’re bothered. They’ll just quietly decide, and go elsewhere next time.
That’s half the day gone, and already the team has a map: where we shine without trying, and where we’re quietly losing people without ever finding out.
Second half: team communication and behaviours
The second half is where it gets personal, in the best way. Because a team can map their patient journey perfectly and still fall over, not because they don’t know what good looks like, but because they can’t consistently deliver it together.
This is where you look at how the team actually works at the desk. The quick one, who wants it sorted now and gets frustrated by faff. The warm one, who leads with people and wants everyone okay. The steady one, who keeps things calm and doesn’t rock the boat. The careful one, who wants it right, not just done. None of these are personality flaws to be trained out of someone. They’re working styles, and the point isn’t to turn everyone into the same kind of person, it’s to stop each of them taking the others’ style personally.
Because that’s where the real friction lives. Not in the patient conversations, but in the sniping between shifts. ‘Well, SOME of us actually do our job properly.’ ‘I don’t have time to babysit.’ ‘Must be nice to just chat all day.’
Every one of those lines is a feeling in disguise – usually: ‘I feel like I’m covering for you’ or ‘I feel unsupported doing this alone’ – said in the worst possible way, at the worst possible moment, to the wrong person. Teach a team to say the actual feeling instead of the sniping version, and you don’t just get a nicer atmosphere. You get a team that backs each other up instead of quietly building resentment that eventually, inevitably, leaks out in front of a patient.
Why the order matters
Do the patient journey first and the behaviours second, and something clicks. The team stops seeing, ‘be more confident on the phone’ and ‘stop taking Dave’s bluntness personally’ as two unrelated instructions. They see it as one thing: how we treat each other is how we end up treating patients, whether we mean it to be or not. A team that’s sniping quietly at each other in the back office does not walk to the front desk and become instantly warm and unhurried. It doesn’t work like that. The tension leaks.
So yes, a day of two halves, but really it’s one lesson told twice. Look outward at the patient journey, find the hot spots worth protecting and the potholes worth fixing. Then look inward at each other, and find the same thing. Complaint handling never needed its own half of the day. It was never really a separate topic. It’s just what happens, eventually, when the other two get ignored for long enough.
‘The rest genuinely does take care of itself’
Accountability. Behaviour. Emotional intelligence. Team culture. Get those right, in both directions, and the rest genuinely does take care of itself.
None of it happens by accident, though. It happens because someone in that practice decided the team was worth the investment, worth a day out of the diary, worth the training budget, worth being told they’re doing well and shown where they could do better. Teams that feel invested in show up differently, for each other and for every patient who walks through the door. If you take nothing else from this, take that: investing in your team isn’t a cost to justify. It’s the whole strategy.
Visit www.adam-aspire.co.uk/join-us/ to learn more about membership options with the Association of Dental Administrators and Managers and how it can support you.
This article is sponsored by ADAM.
