In January we make our transition across to our new patient information and consent booklet, which you can see in the picture above. This has been a long time coming and we wanted to put all of the descriptions of the procedures in the practice and the warnings into one booklet, which is printed but is also available digitally which we can give to patients instead of a horrendous 9 page consent letter.
It looks fantastic and beautiful and if you would like a copy let me know and we can try and get one to you; but more importantly it’s a change in the way that we provide consent, putting some of the responsibility back on the patient to ask us the questions of the things that are most important to them.
So we’ve started to release some of these early to get some feedback. I gave one to a retired dentist who came with his wife who now has time on his hands.
He took it away and came back with some written changes and suggestions that he had made to make it better.
The suggestions were actually pretty good but the first instinct is to say, “I’m sorry but we can’t do anything about it because it’s already printed”.
This represents the most common response to feedback.
The criticism that you feel is directed at yourself when in fact it’s directed at your work.
The work is the work and yourself is yourself; the two things are not the same.
Our consent brochure is a stroke of genius put together by a team at the practice who are really committed to both appearance, branding and content for patients benefit.
The suggestions from the retired dentist are entirely valid and we will take them on board for the next generation of booklet, which won’t happen for about 3 years, but if we write it down now we can make it better then.
As soon as you ship something it becomes imperfect and that’s the rule by which we play. If you ask for feedback then accept it back in good grace because someone is giving his or her advice for free.
Blog post number: 1495
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