A profession working together is a profession working for the patient

At our clinic we have a team of motivated dental professionals who want to continue to progress with the advancing dental knowledge that we continue to learn. It is an honour for me to be a part of such a dedicated team.

We are proud to be involved in education and learning. This week we are hosting a peer group session with other dedicated dental professionals from the wider dental community to discuss the long term care of our patients following advanced dental care, in particular dental implant treatments. It is very important to us and our clinic that we can provide the optimum long term programme to keep our patient’s dental health better for longer. Research in this field is usually a lot slower to develop since such long term studies clearly take a long time. For that reason, we are always learning new ways to provide better maintenance to our patients and it is important for us to evolve with this new information.

The race to the bottom

Recently, it has been brought to my attention that maybe our practice is not advertising ‘enough’. I was shown that some of the other dental practices advertise very heavily on the many social media outlets and on the radio. Having looked at this carefully I realised that it appears to be a very ‘competitive’ marketing strategy where clinics are competing at being louder than each other. I find this type of marketing works for some and not for others.

We feel that it would be wrong for us to spend so much of our time trying to entice patients to come to us through this kind of marketing. When people start competing with each other doing the same thing, it can only result in more focus and money being spent on ‘marketing’ and less focus being given to the patient care and providing quality treatments. Nobody will ever win a marketing ‘war’. It will only ever result in losers, and unfortunately the customer (patient) will always be the loser as it will result in cheaper treatments, cheaper materials and an overall less valuable service.

We take great pride in our patient’s recommending our service to others and in the reviews our patients provide. We also take great pride in continuing to develop our practice to keep up-to-date with all of the modern advancements in our profession. We do this job because we enjoy it and i am very proud to have such a skilled team at our clinic.

Thank you for reading

• Mohsin Patel BDS MJDF RCS (Eng)