Creating a Calm Dental Surgery Atmosphere

Receptionists, dental nurses, and dental practice managers are crucial personnel in creating the right atmosphere in the dental office conducive for treating anxious, nervous, fearful and phobic patients.

All staff should sing from the same hymn sheet, should be pleasant, calm, show a big smile and be caring. Listening to patients and eliciting information from them in a genuine tone to make the patients comfortable is so paramount. Staff should make a real effort in getting to know patients as a human being rather than someone who just comes in to have “their teeth done”.

The dental surgery/practice and office atmosphere can be made calm and unthreatening by the playing of soft neutral music and avoidance of bright lights. Decor in all the rooms should steer away from lots of white clinical walls and avoid lots of “don’t do this and that” type of information notices.

The temperature should be comfortable. The walls can be adorned with useful posters and pictures without being “scary” or too clinical. Likewise, the patient sitting in the waiting room needs to be supplied with up to date general books and magazines. Nervous patients hate “dental” noises and are very sensitive even though the staff become immune and block these out.

These sounds produced from the instruments/machinery in the treatment room should be muted by closing the doors.

Time keeping by the dentists is so critical and patients really appreciate time keeping and are so grateful if they do come early and the dentist does not make them wait even right up to their appointment without reason.

Therefore in this regard, a dentist should manage their diary accurately and efficiently. All anxious patients should not be made to wait too long, so that they have less time to absorb any negative experiences and self-talk which will heighten their anxieties.

Introducing pleasant aromas should be introduced to the dental environment or at least be neutral as this can also help to reduce dental anxiety by covering the smell of dental materials and disinfectants such as eugenol and by the smells released through drilling of tooth structures such as enamel, dentine and pulpal tissue.

Smell can trigger past bad experiences and this array of emotions will subsequently condition a patient negatively towards their dental visit to you. Aromatherapy using oils and candles are one such approach, wherein essential oils through inhalation have an anxiolytic effect and improve relaxation. It is an adjunct in managing moderate rather than severe fears and anxiety or phobia.

In several studies on healthy individuals, the inhalation of lavender oils has been shown to significantly reduce the levels of stress by lowering blood cortisol and decreasing galvanic skin conductance with a lowering of systolic blood pressure.

A patient centred practice as a sensory adapted dental environment (SDE) should always be the focus in increasing pleasantness of the primary senses of sight, sounds, touch, feel, and smell, hence providing a calming atmospheric sensation.