Dental Tribune United Kingdom

Getting best value from your patients page 12DTà Jacqui Goss explains how to considerably increase treatment plan take-up Implant trIbune pages 13-16 Dr Bernd Quantius describes surgical techniques Lateralisation Implant Tribune pages17-20 Design, implementation and prosthetics Patient perspective Implant Tribune pages 21-22 Prof Marcel Wainwright discusses an interesting case 3-d reconstruction Implant Tribune H ow much is a washing machine? What about a car tyre? Or a pair of Christian Louboutin shoes? I suggest most people have some idea about the cost of most things – except dental treatments. I know of no dental practices with a window display showing a set of false teeth with a £750 price tag or advertising braces from £1500. The website www.cos- meticdentistryguide.co.uk prom- ises information about the cost of dental implants but only gives a heavily qualified price of £600. On www.privatehealth.co.uk the cost of an implant in the UK (based on the Branemark sys- tem) is given as £2,000, exclud- ing the crown. With members of the pub- lic having little experience and knowledge to go on, are you sur- prised that the cost of your im- plant treatment plans will come as a (unwelcome) shock to most patients? It doesn’t get better if the patient decides to go home and think about it. With equally little knowledge of the cost of special- ist dental treatments, friends and relatives are likely to express similar shock at the price. “You could buy a (insert consumer product/holiday/item of furni- ture) for that!” will be a typical reaction. And someone is bound to Google ‘implants UK’ and see headline figures of £555, £495, £440 and so on. So if you don’t want lots of proposed treatment plans to bite the dust, what’s the answer? It comes in two forms – the provision of information and the employment of a patient co- ordinator. Presentation, presentation, presentation If you expect a patient to spend £000s for a life-changing treat- ment such as implants you need to do more than scribble the cost on the back of an appointment card. The best dental practices I deal with give their patients an excellently presented treatment plan. Enclosed in a posh looking (but not necessarily expensive) folder, a comprehensive treat- ment plan may run to several pages. Each stage of the proposed treatment is itemised with the dental terminology explained in layman’s language. For example, when first mentioned, periodon- titis is followed by ‘gum disease’ in brackets. There may be a ref- erence to it being commonly re- ferred to in the practice as ‘perio’. That way, when the receptionist asks if a patient has arrived for a perio appointment, the patient will understand. Even when you avoid dental jargon, you still need to consid- er the words used. Describing a dental implant as a ‘small screw made of titanium, which is in- serted into the jaw bone while the patient is under local anaes- thetic’ sounds scary just writing it! Try instead: ‘an artificial re- placement for a tooth root’. By all means include images but they should be of the problem and the anticipated solution, not the process. On YouTube there are animations and videos of all sorts of medical procedures for everything from breast enhance- ment to knee joint replacement. Informative they may be but the visual effect of seeing drills go- ing the jaw for a dental implant tends to draw comments such as: ‘that looks scary’, ‘ouch, that must hurt’ and ‘I hope I never have that done’. Include the costs on the treat- ment plan – broken down for each stage and totalled. Why not itemise labour and materials costs separately? I haven’t seen this on a treatment plan yet but it could usefully make the patient aware that some costs (labora- tory charges, cost of the implant fixture and so on) are outside the Don’t scare your patients with dental jargon