what's up guys i'm Zoh i'm a foundation dentist working here in london and this
is ali he's a final year dental student at university of newcastle
in this video we're going to be talking to you about our first patient
experiences followed by our top five tips on how to prepare for your first
appointment
so we'll actually start by talking about how our first patient appointments were
my one was to be honest quite boring the patient didn't really speak much english
so i tried to get as much information out of them as i could but i wasn't
really able to build a good rapport with them or anything i bought them in
thinking they were my perio patient but they ended up not having perio
their bps was just ones and twos so i was a bit disappointed there
the only real highlight of that appointment was my friends didn't have a
patient so they were signing a bay across and when it got to the point
of me asking a medical history i asked the patient are your bones
healthy i didn't find it that funny at the time to be honest but therefore it
was hilarious and so they were just really laughing at me but we've got some
tips to help you guys with that as well other than that my appointment was quite
boring to be honest i actually had a really interesting first appointment
like 30 year old male walks in seems really normal
i remember calling you actually like so excited i was like this guy's got two
cons grade four bpes a partial denture like the works
everything and i remember they kept grilling it into us
build rapport build rapport and i remember spending like it was a three
hour appointment two and a half of it was speaking about
his family his wife his kids everything and like half an hour was
dentistry i remember taking him down to radiology and nowadays we'd never do
this it sounds silly to anyone who's like a
fifth year for example or graduated and i went and sat for like an hour with him
just speaking about i don't know what like
after all of it he didn't even come back like it was
like you'll go through this i know i know other friends actually went through
the same thing like it's quite frustrating sometimes and
that's pretty much how my first appointment went
really so let's actually start and get into our tips so hopefully your patients
will come back to you our first tip is patients have low
expectations your patients know that they're being seen by students there and
they're not going to have really unrealistically high expectations of how
the appointment will actually go they know what they signed up for so
it's okay to actually make mistakes at first or to stutter or
to get stuck on what you're actually meant to do uh keep in mind the more
patients you see uh the more used to it you'll be and
you'll get a workflow for the way that you
ask questions or the way that you do things these patients won't really
notice when you make a mistake because they don't know what the order is meant
to be so just try and keep a cool head and every single time you think you've
made a mistake or you're stuck on what to do
just ask your clinical supervisor for help or even ask your nurse for help as
well and just keep in mind patient probably has no idea how much
you're struggling so moving on our second tip is to be
ahead of schedule one of the biggest ways to reduce
anxiety and be better prepared for your first appointment is
by looking through your patient notes days before you see them
hopefully they've been seen at the dental hospital before and that will
give you a better understanding of what you expect look at the medical history
see if this could affect your treatment plan
think about what your supervisor might want you to know and present that to
them i familiarize myself with certain drugs
their indications download the bnf app i can't stress that
enough i would also look at the previous dental history to give me a better idea
of what like their status of their oral health is
doing this will make it much easier to talk to the patient because you're not
required to process as much new information on the day
now that you've had a good idea of what you're probably going to be doing that
day advice setting up your day well before your patient gets in and
that way your appointment will run way more smoothly especially if you aren't
familiar with where things are it makes the process
so much more sleek if you just don't disappear every five minutes
to go get materials equipment whatever the likelihood is that because you'll be
seeing this patient for the first time you'll need to do a history
an examination and probably do some further investigations the things i
would have ready in the bay are all the necessary paperwork the most recent
radiographs and exam kit glasses a bib ppe stuff basically a filled up
water cup and possibly an ultrasonic scaler if
you get that far finally eyeing your scrubs if you look good and you feel
good the likelihood is that confidence will resonate to the patient and they'll
feel so much more comfortable in your care
so tip number three is practice taking a medical history
i know a lot of people struggle with taking a medical history and that was me
at first but we're going to be releasing a whole video about taking a full
history next week but if i had to give one piece of advice
it would be to go to your clinic and take a medical history sheet with
you look at each category and come up with a sentence that you feel
comfortable with asking so for example for me for spiritual
problems i ask do you have any problems with your
breathing like asthma this is quite important for the more awkward questions
like instead of saying do you have any urinary tract problems
i would say something along the lines of do you have any problems going to the
toilet instead of neurological problems do you ever experience
faint fit or funny turns and another way to get some of these sentences is by
shadowing or assisting others and i know it sounds super nerdy but if
you ask some of the dentists at your hospital if you can shadow them i think
most of them will be up for it and you can shadow them with a notebook take
notes on the sentences they use the phrases that they use and it can really
help you and to this day i still use phrases that
i've heard other people say and it's really helped me a lot because i know i
can be awkward sometimes but with patience it doesn't really show another
thing you guys need to prepare yourselves for is surprising histories
some patients are going to be very honest with you and they'll tell you
confidential information especially with their drug history for
example i used to use crack cocaine or i smoke marijuana
and you need to learn not to react if they mention something like that just
stay professional just note it jot it down and if you need
to ask further questions so for example if they say that they've smoked
marijuana you will actually need to know when was the last time they smoked
just because of consent issues too many times i've seen someone look really
scared after they find something like that and they just jot it down and look
really awkward and it really does change the vibe of the appointment
okay guys our fourth tip is to be organized and this tip might feel really
extra but it was one of the best things i started
doing in my clinical years i used to go into clinics with my supervisors and
they'd give me some amazing tips and i would say to myself 100 don't worry i
got this i'll remember this next day i've forgotten it you have to
get a reflection diary and write down the main points of what you've learned
and also write down what went wrong in the appointment
and how you would do it differently next time i would split this diary up into
the main subjects like restorative peds oral surgery and so on this helped
me learn from my mistakes so much faster and meant that i didn't have to make the
same mistake over and over again let's say my positioning was wrong while
extracting a tooth but i couldn't quite remember how it was wrong
i would open the book up read in the oral surgery section and fix up from my
mistakes you can even do this on the notes app on your phone it really
doesn't matter how you do it as long as you do
also in line with this is to have an availability diary whether that's on
your phone or a book it really doesn't matter again
so our fifth and final tip is to talk to others in new year i found this really
useful especially when i was doing difficult things that i've never done
before so for example if i was doing a root canal
treatment for the first time i would talk to someone who's just done that and
they could give me little tips like for example
what materials to get ready before the patient comes in or what things tend to
run out at dispensary so i can get them before anyone else does i mostly found
it good to talk to my friends before with these kind of appointments because
it just made me feel more comfortable going into the appointment
because i just have a better idea of what i'm meant to do and what the
supervisor expects of me all right guys that was our last tip
thank you guys so much for watching and i hope it helped you
if it did please drop a like and subscribe and so the video gets out to
more and more people uh we'd love to hear what your first
person experiences were like as well so just
leave that in the comments and we can have a conversation about that see you
in the next video see ya