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Dental Tribune United Kingdom Edition

March 25-31, 201314 Opinion United Kingdom Edition14 page 13DTß Premier® Dental Products Company • 07824442598 • www.premusa.com • Cosmetic • Endo/Restorative • Hygiene/Perio • Instruments • Prosthetic Y E A R S For more information, contact Scott Julian, UK Sales Manager: Tel: 07824442598 • Email: sjulian@premusa.com Available through: CTS Dental Supplies • DentalSky • Dental Directory DMI Ireland • Henry Schein/Minerva • Karma Dental Supplies • Kent Express • Glycol base to minimize potential for sensitivity • Convenient and economical 3cc syringes • Blue travel pouch for patient convenience • Comparable to 5.3% Hydrogen Peroxide Perfecta® Smiles Perfecta 16% Carbamide Peroxide - for safe, predictable whitening Dental Tribune March Ad.indd 1 3/11/13 1:53 PM to focus on the long-term but at the same time we have to give patients what they want. As we all know, very often pa- tients don’t know what they want, or they think they know what they want, and don’t nec- essarily have all of the facts and evidence to hand. Finan- cially some patients may have only short-term goals. Students for example may not be able to afford major treatments until a later date. We should always endeavour to provide a solution with as little harm to the long- term prospects as possible. With treatment discussions, ‘no’ sometimes means ‘no not now’ rather than ‘no not ever’. If a student came to you who needed an implant but couldn’t afford it, it would be very wrong to cut down their adjacent teeth and make a bridge (short term gain) when in the long-term they would be better off hav- ing an implant and just waiting for it. If the problem short-term is financial then we should al- ways do something that’s re- versible and non-damaging. But there’s also another el- ement to this short-term gain discussion that we haven’t yet considered. How does taking the long-term perspective ben- efit our practices as business- es? Someone once told me that the biggest practice builder is emergency patients. If you re- ally help someone out, then more often than not, they will stay with you for life. That’s be- cause people don’t forget the great service provided. They don’t forget if you go out of your way to help them out in a difficult situation. If you’ve got an emergency in and you’ve been punitive with fees and ‘fast buck’ culture, yes you’ve got them out of pain, but no, they’re not going to come back. For the sake of a few hundred pounds you’ve soured a rela- tionship for a lifetime. If you think about the cost of patient acquisition and how much a patient is worth to a practice these days (especially taking patient longevity into account), sometimes it’s even worth just shrugging your shoulders and waiving a fee if that means you might be able to keep hold of someone for 10, 20, 30 years or more. So there’s a lot more to my old mentor’s advice than meets the eye. Yes, a fast buck cer- tainly nearly always is your last buck, but this simple state- ment means so much more than that, and has an impact on all of our working lives. It certainly means to look at the long-term over the short, but it also means that sometimes, going out of your way to do something (however small) for a patient, can reap you great re- wards over the course of your practising lifetime. DT ‘Yes, a fast buck certainly nearly always is your last buck, but this simple statement means so much more than that, and has an impact on all of our work- ing lives’ About the author Dr Michael Sultan BDS MSc DFO FICD is a Specialist in Endodontics and the Clini- cal Director of EndoCare. Mi- chael qualified at Bristol Uni- versity in 1986. He worked as a general dental practitioner for 5 years before commenc- ing specialist studies at Guy’s hospital, London. He com- pleted his MSc in Endodon- tics in 1993 and worked as an in-house Endodontist in various practices before set- ting up in Harley St, London in 2000. He was admitted onto the specialist register in Endodontics in 1999 and has lectured extensively to postgraduate dental groups as well as lecturing on En- dodontic courses at Eastman CPD, University of London. He has been involved with numerous dental groups and has been chairman of the Al- pha Omega dental fraternity. In 2008 he became clinical director of EndoCare, a group of specialist practices.