Reasons an Open Treatment Area Will Benefit Your Staff
The following are just a few of the reasons why creating an open treatment area will help your staff:
1. Improve the flow of traffic
It will be much easier for your staff to move around your practice if you’ve implemented an open treatment area. This is because if you decided to build individual patient rooms instead, then you would have staff members clogging the hallways — especially in smaller practices. When you have an open treatment area, it means that you will have fewer hallways, making it easier for your staff to move around. This helps to improve the flow of traffic, which allows your staff to move around more efficiently and will help cut down on the frustration of having to maneuver around patients and other staff members as they get in each other’s ways.
2. Make it easier to find patients
If you have a larger practice, then one of the challenges that staff members often have is moving patients from the waiting room to their assigned treatment rooms. Once they’ve been put into these rooms, they can often be forgotten about on particularly busy days. Not to mention that when staff members are running around with paperwork, they may forget where the patient has been put, requiring them to ask other staff members or to go knocking on patient rooms in search of who they’re looking for.
This is a huge hassle that can be eliminated by building an open treatment area. This way, staff members can simply poke their heads into the space and visually look for the patient they’re looking for. Not only does this cut down on frustration, it helps save time as well.
3. Make it easier to work with patients
If you have a smaller practice, then your patient treatment rooms can get quite cramped. You want your dentist and their assistant to be able to move around the patient freely and easily in order to treat the patient effectively. You need a lot of space for equipment as well. A small treatment room makes it more difficult to stay organized and to retrieve different tools and equipment that might be needed, which makes it inefficient for your staff.
By having an open treatment area, your staff will be able to freely move around so that they can treat patients more effectively. Additionally, you’ll have more space for equipment and it will be easier to organize your tools, which means that your staff will spend less time trying to move around to try and find the tools that they need.
As you can see, an open treatment space has several advantages over the standard patient treatment room. If you’re remodeling your dental practice, then you should strongly consider designing an open treatment space for the benefit of your staff. For more advice on how to get the most out of your dental practice remodel, be sure to contact us at HJT Dental Design Consultants to request a free consultation today.