As lyricist Leonard Cohen’s Anthem points out: ‘There is a crack… in everything. That's how the light gets in.’
Indeed, it was within this locked down and fractured world that one dental practice found its own ray of sunshine, cementing its innovative solution to a industry-wide problem – that of consulting with patients often fearful of taking the first step into the dental environment.
The enforced break in chairside activity saw private practice Care Dental Platinum and its sister, The Care Dental Practice (a mixed practice), launch complimentary virtual consultations (albeit it a little earlier than planned). These online face-to-face Zoom communications – already in situ for the more phobic patient – offered anyone in need of dentistry a semblance of the services they were being denied.
Situated in West London’s Hammersmith Road, and mostly reliant on the people in the surrounding office blocks for footfall, The Care Dental Group shut down with many of its commuter clients miles away from their practice.
Care Dental Platinum specialises in the sympathetic care of nervous patients and is run by Dr Bashar al Naher and his two daughters – clinical lead Safa and business development manager Sara. Like many businesses, the practice took a big hit when lockdown began and, at the time, Sara believed it would take a lot of hard work and many months for the award-winning practice to get back on track. However, fortuitously the business has capitalised on the fact that many patients were left wanting because of practice closures in the capital. In a strangely serendipitous way, their socially distanced virtual consultations boomed, powered by the very force that threatened to destroy them.
Safa says: ‘Strangely, we’d been waiting for a shift in mindset for a very long time. Virtual smile consultations save chair time and travel time and offer an alternative route for those patients who are nervous to come in to see us. In a COVID-19 world, our consultations also minimise time and numbers in the practice and therefore meet infection control expectations.
‘In fact, we have had a plethora of emergency and new video consultations and some days I am back-to-back speaking to patients via my laptop. This pandemic has forced everyone’s hand, and has brought forward the concept of digital consultations by five years. Building trust virtually is part of the “new normal” and we are really happy that a wider population is now more open to it. When disasters strike, you have to make it work for you. You have to adapt to change and we all must shift our way of thinking.’
Also important to the practice’s post-lockdown rebirth was the support of its staff. Management made every effort to stay engaged with the rest of the team, acutely aware that, as a family-run practice, they had each other for support whereas others may have lived alone or needed reassurance that they had their best interests at heart. Mindful of the need to remain all-inclusive with team members outside of the tight family unit, they gifted all each member of their staff an online education course of their choice to keep them busy and focused.
Sara explains: ‘Our immediate reaction was to question how we were going to survive this pandemic and what we could do to help our patients. There were rumours abound and every aspect of dentistry was up in the air. With very little guidance, our next concern was for our team – and the online courses were a small way of reaching out to them. We felt we had a responsibility to reassure them.’
One team member learnt to code, whilst another trained in Pilates and, once they’d all enjoyed their own non-dental learning experience, the team regrouped via Zoom calls to share their individual experiences.
Sara explains: ‘We found our own way to reassure them, encourage them to trust us and together we all worked towards reopening – whenever that was going to be.’
Their plans also included an intuitive anticipation of the need for extra PPE, which meant they were prepped when dentists got the green light to return to practice.
Looking back, Safa reflects: ‘It has been three weeks since we opened and we inevitably have had a backlog of patients. We had a tracker for each dentist and booked appointments for all of our emergency patients.
But we also suddenly found we were having calls from across London from patients whose dentist wasn’t open. To accommodate, we have extended our opening hours in the week until 7.00pm, are opening from 10.00am until 5.00pm on Saturdays and now offer a 24-hour online chat service. Our aim is simple: to make it as easy as possible for people in dental need to contact us.’
The specialists in the practice are also now planning to reopen their treatments and, although inevitably some patients remain very anxious, the Zoom consultations are making a difference.
Safa, her father and the team have also been guided by Pandora Dental, a pioneering collective of 150 independent dental surgeons, an evidence-based support group that has developed what it argues is a better way to deliver dentistry to patients.
Led by Dr Mark Cronshaw, Pandora Dental spent lockdown researching pioneering technologies and materials, and pooling resources to create a pathway that mitigates a 0.1% risk of cross infection to patients.
Safa, who sees it transforming into ‘quite a force as a lobbying group’ says: ‘Pandora is waving the flag for dentists. Their evidence-based approach to dentistry means that a lot of the measures they suggest make practices safe enough for patients to come to see us. As a profession, we are all going to make the same mistakes. We listened to what the group had to say and decided to invest in in air filtration units, for example. These measures are not necessarily going to be the same for every practice. Our Standard Operating Procedures are personal to us and we used the evidence from Pandora as a cross reference.’
With constant communication with patients, a number of articles published in the UK press and even an appearance on BBC news, the team has ensured dentistry has remained at the forefront of public awareness – even if they could not open their doors to them.
Sara says: ‘This period of time has been a tipping point for many businesses but we attempted to take charge from the beginning – ordering extra PPE for example – and, although we couldn’t anticipate what type of masks we’d would need, Dr Bashar anticipated that respiration masks might prove essential so we added those to our order, too.
‘Since opening, we have had a lot of new patients through our doors, many of whom have been delighted to see a dental practice open. Next week, the hygiene team are back and we are now making periodontal patients a priority. Having the evidence-based information generously made available by Pandora gave us hope and the motivation we needed to be forward thinking. We really did not take the foot off the pedal.’