![]() There are some long-standing patients that always come in at a particular time. Although at first, we all thought it wouldn’t go down well with the patients. If you can’t get your private patients in, then you can’t achieve your targets. You need your UDAs across the year or your membership plan targets. So, you have to know what you need to achieve by the end of the day, the week, the month, the year even. You wouldn’t just keep wandering about aimlessly. You wouldn’t switch on your sat nav and not enter a postcode. We have a treatment slot at eleven o’clock in two weeks’ time.’ The reception team just needs to know that they have the autonomy to offer those appointments without devaluing that book for you. Jones, you’d like a check-up? Yes, we have nine o’clock on Tuesday.’ And then when that patient comes out, ‘Treatment? Yes, no problem. Using the zoning means that whoever on the team is answering the telephone, they can say categorically, ‘Oh, Mrs. Or, if you have a cancellation list, you could ring somebody on that list and get them seen sooner. Perhaps to someone who needs seeing quickly but who wouldn’t be considered an emergency. If you have emergency slots scheduled daily then, if one doesn’t get filled, you can offer it to somebody else. It’s best to have emergency slots every day so people aren’t just being squeezed in here and there. ![]() So, it’s best to ensure that when your recalls go out, they are spread across the diary.Īlso, recall slots should be shorter than treatment slots. If you have too many of these, you might not be able to treat people for six or seven weeks. Once you’ve started zoning your diary, it’s important to make sure you don’t have days and days of examinations only. They’re the people who are booking the patients into the diary and if they don’t know the detail of what they should be putting in to achieve that goal for you, you won’t achieve it. Don’t be afraid to do that because your team needs to know. Once you have that information and have made that decision, you need to share it with your team. If you have a mixed practice, then obviously it’s a mixed bag of how many UDAs you need to deliver and how much money you need to make. how much money you need to earn if you don’t have a UDA target. how many UDAs you need to achieve that day or b. If you’re starting to zone your diary now, then I think the most important thing is to know either a. So that was the basic setting for zoning. To be able to hit our daily financial target, we had to zone our diaries into treatment, examination and emergency slots each day. Why not come along if you’re going to the show? Know what you need to achieve with diary zoning One of the sessions at Practice Plan’s Dental Business Theatre at the British Dental Conference and Dentistry Show on 12 and 13 May is ‘How can my practice beat the cost-of-living crisis?’ where a panel of experts will offer some answers to this big question. During a cost-of-living crisis, it’s important to make sure the practice is bringing in the right amount of money. He shared that information with us, and so knew we had to hit that amount of money. Our dentist was very keen on us knowing exactly how much we needed to earn as a business to be viable. Back then it was just a case of dividing the diary to make sure we were earning the right amount of money each day. In my experience, zoning diaries can help a lot. Although this is something that predates Covid-19, the time versus patient need tension is becoming a bigger issue. ![]() There are also a lot of patients coming forward and saying, ‘I really need to see a dentist urgently’. These dentists are left wondering, where do we book them? How do we see all these patients? We’ve all seen the stories in the national media that NHS dentists just can’t take on patients. This is especially the case with NHS practices. There’s always been an abundance of patients but now there’s been an increase in demand, teams are struggling to accommodate. Right now, I see quite a lot of practices struggling with time. Diary zoning – is it time to go back to basics?Īs practices are struggling to meet patient demand for appointments, Practice Plan regional support manager, Deborah Bell, explains how diary zoning may help relieve some of the pressure on front of house teams.
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