2017 New Grad Edition - 57

by Jennifer de St. Georges
Jennifer de St. Georges has
spoken at virtually every major
dental meeting, where doctors
and staff members alike have
appreciated her logical and
commonsense solutions for
today's management issues.
Effective communication skills
and detailed workbooks are key
to de St. Georges' programs. Her
most recent e-book for dental practices, about using digital
brochures to welcome patients, aims to connect dentists
with potential and current social media-savvy patients.
Contact: jdsg.com or 800-393-2207.

I'm not a dentist, but I feel like I went
to dental school. I married my former
husband, Edmond, two weeks after he
graduated from dental school, and I've
been connected to the profession for
more than four decades since.
The dental school faculty encouraged graduates
to first select a location where they wanted to live, and
then to determine where in that location they wanted to
practice. During Edmond's last year of school we spent
every weekend driving around Northern California to
find our "ideal location." We decided not to follow the
faculty's advice and instead selected a city that was off
the beaten track-not one we'd live in, but one with a
fast-growing population and few dentists in the area. We
never looked back; within a year, we bought the perfect
home that was a 20-minute drive from the practice.
Other graduates opened practices in downtown
areas or beautiful coastal cities, but these popular
areas were already packed with hundreds of dentists
who also wanted to live there! The going was hard for
many practices and while many survived, a few didn't.
Historically, after graduation, a vast majority of
dentists chose to open their own practice with a minority
choosing post-graduate, military or associateship. For
the past few years, there has been a total reversal of
how graduates are handling their entry into the dental
world. With the high cost of equipping a new practice,
plus the desire to hone their clinical and management
skills, most graduates have moved towards first working
as an associate in a wide variety of delivery options.

How to get a good sense of the practice
even before your first interview begins
I believe that doing homework before your interview
will increase the potential of you finding a practice that
meets your expectations.
* Call the practice during the day to give you
an idea of how patients are handled. Likewise,
call when you know the practice is closed and
analyze the outgoing message. Listening for key
things gives you a great deal of information about
the quality of practice you're applying to. Is the
message professional? Does it contain all the
information patients need to know when they call?
Are emergencies given clear directions for help? A
practice's outgoing message tells one so much about
the attitude of the owner and the quality of the
practice/patient relationship and customer service.
* Arrive at least an hour before your scheduled
interview appointment. (Tell the staff you
left extra driving time.) Investing an hour to
sit in the reception room will show you more
about the practice than you would learn in
multiple interviews. Pay attention to how the
telephones are answered, and how patients are
released at the end of their appointments. Is the
administrative staff casual about communicating fi nancially with patients? ("That's OK, just
mail us a check when you have time.") Or is
there no discussion with the patients about their
fi nancial obligation and responsibilities? When
administrative team members aren't committed
to-or are uncomfortable with-discussing and
collecting money at the front desk, it doesn't
bode well for an associate's future income!
dentaltown.com \\ NEW GRAD 2017

http://www.jdsg.com http://www.dentaltown.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of 2017 New Grad Edition