Educating Your Patients

Its one of the biggest challenges we face as dental hygienists- educating our patients. Often times we are trying to  teach them things they could care less about, you can see their eyes glaze over when you start to talk about floss.

Here are a couple of things that I have found helpful in my quest to educate the masses -

Although I have never  found handing a patient information to be extremely beneficial, this brochure tends to get the point across when addressing periodontal disease- the pictures say it all. I like to run through it with the patient while in the office.

 I have worked in a few offices that have different computer programs designed to educate patients on all types of oral conditions. It has been my experience that these programs don't get used very frequently. I decided to add a section to my offices website. I titled it "PATIENT LIBRARY" and I added information on different topics. When a patients has a question or I want them to have some additional information I will email the link to them.
This section has also come in very useful for our offices SEO- when we post blogs we back link to this section and we also post links on our Facebook page.