What are benches for?

This answer to this question may seem blindingly obvious but in practices all over the country I see dentists who get it wrong. Hugely wrong.

Regularly I go into practices where they have 10 or 15 square metres of bench space and every last centimetre of it is covered with piles of stuff. That creates three problems:

A problem with sterility — is it good to take gloves out of a box that has been sitting in dental aerosol for a month?

A problem with appearance — patients walk into an environment that looks chaotic, messy and disorganised.

Finally, a problem with efficiency — despite all the bench space it is all occupied and so things need to be shuffled around constantly.

In my last practice I had less than one square metre of bench space. Of that I never used it all except when I was doing a very big task like a root filling, core and crown prep. For a filling we never used even 50% of the available bench space.

So, what's the answer to the title of this article?Benches are for working. Cupboards and drawers are for storage so stop using your benches for storage.

Modularise and put your supplies in the cupboard. You will be amazed at how much free space that creates. You will also be amazed at how much better it looks and how much easier it is to work efficiently.