Walking patient out to reception

A while ago a dentist asked me if they should walk the patient out to reception at the end of their appointment.

At first I thought to myself: “It’s an unimportant question.” Then on further reflection I realised it wasn’t.

In my practice I never walked the patient out to reception and here are three good reasons why.

• Efficiency (dentist)
  If a dentist wants to work as efficiently as possible they should never do things that can be delegated. That’s a bedrock rule for efficient dentists. You should be in the operatory doing dentistry not doing tasks that the team can easily do for you.

• Efficiency (front desk)
  Quite often when I walked the patient out we would get into a conversation. That held up the reception staff. Instead of getting on with the things they needed to do they would be held up by my chatting. It was a bottle-neck for them and for me.

• Embarrassment
  Often when I walked out to reception I’d bump into a patient. They’d say to me: “Hello Mark!” and I’d say to them “Hello …” because I couldn’t immediately remember their name. It was always awkward and made me and the patient, whose name I could not recall, feel uncomfortable.

In fact, mainly because of the second reason, my team asked me not to come out to reception.

Everything in the practice ran better when I didn’t.