Regional Support Manager, Deborah Bell, shares a visual technique to help build rapport with patients.
Building rapport with your patients is essential if you want to achieve a long-term relationship with them. Having rapport also helps establish trust, which is important if you want them to take your advice on treatment and oral healthcare.
The way to build rapport is to find out more about your patient. This lets them know you’re interested in them as a person. The way to achieve this is by asking them questions about themselves to open up a conversation with them.
The ‘five bums on a rugby post’ is a technique to help get the conversation going and to keep it flowing. It’s something that I’ve been using in our training sessions for at least a decade now, so it’s tried and tested. Anyone who’s been in one of my training sessions might have seen this.
You may find it useful to use pen and paper to get a visual representation of this. So, draw a set of rugby posts, which are like a very large letter H. Then, on the horizontal post, draw some curvy ‘W’ shapes to represent the five bums. So, these little bums all stand for a ‘W’ word, which we’ll use to help us find out more about our patients and build rapport with them. These words are very useful for many different conversations with patients and also in everyday life.
Begin with H
Let’s start with the H, which is the rugby post. This stands for ‘How’.
So, in practice, when we meet a new patient, we might be asking questions such as, ‘How did you find out about us?’ How is that treatment for you?’ ‘How do you feel about your smile?’ or just, ‘How are you feeling generally?’ Once we find out the answers to those questions, we can use the information we get from our patients to develop the conversation and our understanding of them further.
It’s also useful to ask these sorts of questions of our colleagues too. Because it’s always good to find out a bit more about our colleagues while we’re going about our day, as this helps build relationships among the team as well.
Five W’s
Next, we move onto our five W’s, which are the little bums all sitting on the goalpost. These are the ‘W’ questions that will help you build that conversation. It’s just a little quirky reminder.
The ‘W’ questions are who, where, what, when, and why. ‘Why’ is always a good question. It’s also something we use a lot as a team. Such as, ‘Why do we do things?’ ‘Why is that important?’ So, it’s a good one to use with your patients. After you’ve asked, ‘How did you find us?’ You can ask, ‘Why did you choose us?’ Which then could lead onto ‘What was it that brought you here?’ What is it you’re looking for?
What we want to achieve by asking these ‘w’ (or open) questions is something other than just a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer. We want to be able to continue the conversation and let the patient feel we’re really interested in them.
We can formulate quite a few questions using these ‘W’ words. ‘Why’ is a very useful one as it gets at the person’s motive for coming to see you. ‘Why is it you’ve come here today?’ You may get the response, ‘I’ve got a wedding coming up, and I want my teeth to look amazing.’ This would lead onto talking about treatments and so on.
Other questions could be, ‘What can we do for you?’ ‘Where did you find out about us?’ What’s important to you about your smile?’ ‘What are you looking for from a dentist?’ These are all useful questions for finding out what the patient wants to achieve either now or in the longer term.
Wider uses
This technique is something your treatment coordinator could use to sniff out a greater range of treatment plans. By finding out more about patients and the types of treatments patients are looking for, you can identify gaps in your treatment offering. Then, if you’re recruiting a new dentist, you might choose to employ someone who has the skills to be able to provide the treatments patients have expressed an interest in, but you aren’t currently able to offer.
When people ask very basic questions such as ‘Do you have any problems?’, they’ll more than likely elicit just a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer, and suddenly the conversation has ended, and they have to start again. I feel it helps if you can ask questions such as, ‘Why did you come along today?’ What was your purpose?’’ What are you looking for? Where do you see your smile in five years’ time?’
Some of my practices have told me they think it’s a little cheesy or they feel a bit awkward using the technique at first. My advice is to work with it. Try the easy ones initially, such as the ‘why’ and the ‘how.’ It’s amazing how these can open up the conversation. Which is great. However, what you want is to keep that conversation going so you can continue to find out more about your patients and develop your rapport.
So, this technique is a fun and useful tool to help remind you of the sorts of questions to ask to keep the conversation flowing so you can build your relationship with your patient.
You can listen to Deborah explain this technique more fully in this bodcast.
About Deborah
