A Dental Consultant’s Excellent Aquarium Adventure

This week I decided to do some volunteer work and became a new member of the volunteer force at a local aquarium that rescues, rehabilitates and releases injured sea turtles and marine mammals.

On my first day I was instructed to shadow another volunteer and I was put with an intern who was on her last day. For the first two hours of this “training”, the only thing I learned was that the members of the staff didn’t really get along. Ooh, that gave me a warm and fuzzy feeling. The rest of her information was bits and pieces of data thrown at me in lightning fire fashion that didn’t actually have much relevance to what I would be doing, whatever that would be.

I saw the writing on the wall so I attached myself to two other volunteers working in a team. They seemed unsure of what their jobs were themselves so this didn’t exactly leave me with a lot of confidence.

So I moved on to another intern who proved to be extremely useful. She proceeded to show me how and when things are done but I noticed she was telling me about a lot of protocols that should be written as policy to be studied. I also noted that many of her sentences started with: “This should be done but we haven’t been doing it lately so you don’t have to do it this way if you don’t want to….” Why was she saying that? Because that’s how she was trained.
Although I was relieved to finally be with someone who knew her job well, I couldn’t help but wonder how much policy is being relayed incorrectly, how much of this unwritten policy would I be able to retain, and worse, how much policy is not being relayed at all. It’s no wonder that the staff members are arguing with each other – no one is doing anything right. There’s no agreement amongst them on what IS right.

Here’s a situation that because of the lack of written policy, correct procedures gradually drop out with every new person that comes along. Sound familiar? I could have been put with the best of the best interns, but due to human error I will never be trained correctly. This type of training is called, “Learn by being yelled at when it’s done wrong” and it’s the type of training that’s going to produce a high turnover in your staff.

If you have no or little written policy in your dental practice don't worry, you’re in luck. We’ve done it for you. Check out our dental office manuals.

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