Someone who cares

Fazeela Osborne Khan asks what makes an exceptional dentist.

Good relationships with patients can help to prevent not just dental anxiety, but dental neglect. If, as a team, you don’t prioritise the building and maintaining of productive relationships with your patients, you will see more contacting you with a problem that requires a more time-consuming and expensive solution because it has been allowed to progress. This experience will often be stressful too, for everyone involved.

Positive relationships mean you can share knowledge and develop trust and understanding. As a profession, we have long dealt with negative stereotypes about what we do, and few people would admit they actually enjoy attending dental visits, whether for a consultation or treatment. But patients are often far more interested in their mouth than we think.

Being able to give patients the whole picture, so they can see how they got to where they are today, will enable them to take ownership of their oral health. To get this, you’ll also need the skills to gather as much information as possible from them, during every interaction you have. Communication is one of the crucial pillars for a successful career and, if you are a novice dentist, you may find that this is one of the most challenging aspects of those early days.