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https://youtu.be/633glIlSPuc

Today's topic is dental hygienists and why it's important for dental hygienist to have good verbal communication skills.

As we mentioned before, improving communication in your dental office is important.

RDH magazine had this to say about communication

First patients need to understand and accept how their habits behaviors and general health impacts their oral health status.

Second, they must understand what professional and personal treatment options are available.

Third, they must comprehend and commit to all aspects of agreed-upon treatment plan.

So that's why it's important for dental hygienist to have good verbal communication, so you are able to explain all of those different elements to your patients.

You have to be able to have good verbal communication in order to convey all that information and have them understand it clearly.

That's why it's good for dental hygienists to have verbal good verbal communication skills.

Tips for good communication

Here are a few tips that I've learned in just personally in my career...

When I was a human resources specialist and then turned freelancer and work with a lot of different customers and client from a lot of different backgrounds and two of the main tricks that I use to help improve my verbal communication and these just kind of helped me throughout my career and hopefully to help you as well.

First, to use analogies so when you're explaining these complicated policies and processes to someone who doesn't work with them on a regular basis.

Sometimes it it doesn't quite click in their head because they don't have to work with it all the time, so I use analogies quite a bit so that I can compare what I'm trying to explain to a situation that's similar in that way you know it helps the the client the customer the patient to kind of put the pieces together in their head and compare the analogy with what's actually happening.

This helps them understand, helps clarify some things for them.

The other thing I do is I repeat back. So if a client or a customer is picking me and I'm not quite understanding what it is they're saying, I might repeat back to them okay so what I heard you say was or what you're saying is or what I think you're saying is fill in the blank

A lot of the times, that gives them the opportunity to either say yes that's exactly what I'm talking about or no that's not what I'm trying to say at all so that way you can kind of help communicate those complicated processes and procedures to someone and you know kind of garner their understanding of the concept.

Those are my tips for helping improve your verbal communication.

Record yourself

One other that I will suggest is you know I you know have a lot of people tell me that they are nervous interviewing. If you tuned in for the video I did yesterday, I talked about front office managers and hiring skills and being the interviewer.

When you're trying to improve your verbal communication, what I always suggest is to record yourself so take your phone or your laptop and record yourself trying to convey what is this you're trying to convey.

So if you're an interviewer asking the questions that you want to ask in the interview, or if you're an interviewee answering some questions or if you're just trying to improve the way that you explain something to somebody and as a dental hygienist or you know in general, record yourself trying to explain those things to somebody. That way when you play it back to yourself you can see just how well you explained it and you can hone in on those verbal communication skills and also nonverbal communication skills, which are also very important when speaking with somebody face-to-face.

If you review that recording of you trying to explain process or procedure to someone or a treatment plan to someone or something like that you can kind of pick up on those little things that can help you improve your verbal communication when you're trying to communicate you convey that information to a patient.

Those are my tips and tricks for use today. If you have any other tips and tricks about how to improve your verbal communication or if you have any other thoughts about dental hygienist verbal communication, please leave it in a comment.

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