The Most Important Parts Of Dental Office Design Plans

If you have a dental office, there are a lot of things you need to think about. We will take a look at some of the most important items. In general, however, it is about look, functionality and comfort. Those are the three main elements you need to capture in your dental office design plans.

Make Sure You Have the Right Size

You need to make sure you are using a building that is the right size for your needs. You need to comfortably house your staff, your storage, your surgery room and a waiting area for your patients. Do try to think about the future as well. If you intend to grow, it may be more useful to find a property that is initially too large for your needs, leaving some of the spaces unused until you have grown. This is often cheaper than having to move your entire office at a later stage.

Your Office and Your Entire Life

You have to think about your own happiness as well. Being a dentist or dental assistant is hard work and you must have the space to be able to unwind after a particularly hard job or day. You have to have some room for fun and socializing. If you have sufficient space, try to have a little kitchen for your staff with a seating area, and try to have a private office for yourself as well. However, use your private office for essential business and not to alienate yourself from your staff. Spend some time in the little kitchen yourself too in other words.

The Hub and Spoke of Your Office

The most important thing about a dental office is to have the space to sterilize and resupply your office. If you have an office with less than ten treatment areas, you only need a single sterilization area. Anymore is simply a waste of money, but also a waste of efficiency. It is important to have an area for sterilization that everybody is comfortable with and knows how to use. This is more efficient than having lots of areas with high-tech equipment.

Think of Your Inventory

As a dental office, you will need quite a lot of storage space. It is best to have a single area that holds everything you need. That way, stock control is a lot easier and you will know immediately if something is starting to run out. Remember that you need dental and office supplies, and you may as well store all of them in one area.

Links to Labs

It is very likely that you will need to work together with labs quite regularly. For a small dental office, a lab is often offsite and sending items to the lab is done by the assistants and receptionists. However, larger dental offices may have a lab onsite. Either way, you need to make sure that your dental office is designed in such a way that it is easy to get results to and from a lab. You must consider contamination as well in this respect.

Sound Barriers

Once upon a time, reception areas were hidden away somewhere, with patients who were waiting being treated more like furniture than anything else. This is no longer quite acceptable. It is far more common now to have the reception area as the central hub of a dental office, with the rooms leading on to it. Unfortunately, many people are still very much afraid of the dentist and they will struggle to be quiet during procedures. However, even if you have the most fearless patients, a lot of dental equipment, like the drill, is quite noisy and these are not sounds other patients want to hear. You must, therefore, consider having the right soundproofing systems in place.

The Reception Area

We have already discussed that the reception area should be the central hub of your dental office. Make sure that it is well lit and comfortable. Modern furniture and clean flooring is greatly appreciated. Try to create a homely feel, rather than a clinical feel within the reception area. Consider having a little play area for children for instance and have some prints on the walls. You should think of the reception area as a hotel room: a comfortable area in which your patients want to spend time relaxing before they go for a procedure. Playing soft music is often also appreciated and you should use some live plants if at all possible.

Naturally, you will also need a reception desk. Make sure this area is clean and tidy and that your receptionists are all friendly, well groomed and approachable. Often, patients do not like to see long rows of filing cabinets. It makes them feel like their privacy is not protected. You may, hence, want to consider having a small storage room behind the receptionist's desk where you can store all your patient files. On a psychological level, people prefer receptionist's desks that are curved and made of light woods. It appears that soft curves and light colors have a calming and relaxing effect, which is exactly what patients need before seeing a dentist.

The Treatment Rooms

One of the most important parts of dental office design plans is the treatment area itself. A treatment room should be as small as possible, whilst maintaining its functionality. You will need all the necessary dental cabinets that hold your tools and instruments and other necessities of the dental industries. The dental patient chair should be central in the room and there should also be sufficient space for a dentist's stool. You must be able to move around comfortably in the area, whilst always being within easy reach of all the items that you may need. Designing the treatment room is usually the hardest part, because it needs to hold so many different things without being cluttered. Luckily, there are numerous companies out there that focus on dental cabinets and other dental office supplies that should be able to help you design your perfect treatment room.