How to Create an Inviting Dental Practice and Keep Your Patients at Ease

In the United States, about one-third of the population has anxiety or fears when it comes to going to the dentist. 

If you’re trying to attract people to your dental practice, one of the best ways you can ease your patient’s fears is to make sure that they’re comfortable with going into your office. 

Thankfully there are multiple different ways that you can make your office seem inviting and calming! We’ll share our tips here. 

Choose the Right Lighting

Choosing the right lighting will make or break how your office feels for new patients.

Using harsh or fluorescent light might make the place seem eery or intimidating. Instead, try to use as much natural sunlight as you can. 

Having windows for natural light can be the best way to get natural light, but you don’t want it to be so harsh that it will blind everyone. 

Have Low Wait Times

A lot of patient’s anxieties might come from having to wait a long time in the waiting room. It’s often the worry of what’s going to happen that’s the worst, so make sure you don’t have patients wait too long in your waiting room. 

If you can’t avoid having a long wait time, try and at least make it seem like they’re not waiting a long time. Try and keep them occupied with tasks or something to do to make the wait seem a little bit shorter than it really is.   

Incorporate Small Luxuries

People might walk into your office’s waiting room expecting the bare minimum, but you can use this to surprise them with small luxuries. 

Your patients will notice that you went the extra mile to help make them feel more comfortable.

This could be something like getting comfortable furniture, having nice decor, offering free refreshments, or giving them multiple options for entertainment. 

Choose a Good Floor Plan

You may not think about it, but having a good floor plan is also important when trying to minimize dental anxiety. 

Look through some dentist office floor plans to find one that works best for your flow of staff and patients. There are many different companies that can help you with this whether you’re building a new building or trying to renovate an existing one. 

Customize it for Your Target Audience

Next, you’ll have to tailor your waiting room to fit your target audience.

For example, if you’re a family dental practice, you may want to make sure you have things to keep both children and parents entertained. 

Instead, if your patients are only going to be adults, you can make the waiting room more mature. 

Choose Calming Colors

Once you’ve established your target audience, you’ll then have to choose colors to paint your office. Try and choose colors that are calming.

These might be cool colors, like light purple, blue, or pale yellow. Harsher colors may make your patients feel anxious without them even realizing it.

However, it’s always a good idea to go with neutral colors as well. You can never go wrong with a nice beige. 

Learn More About How to Attract Patients to Your Dental Practice

These are only a few tips on how to keep your patients coming back to your dental practice with little to no anxiety.

However, it can be difficult to know sometimes what else to do to help find more patients. 

If you’re interested to learn more, make sure you explore our website to find more just like this one!