During this episode of the Practice Accelerator Podcast, we speak with Dr. Sunny Gill, founder of the City Dental Toronto Group, and founding partner of the HealthOne Medical Group. Dr Gill discusses the changes his practice is planning upon reopening, such as increased PPE and patient screenings. He also emphasises the importance of creating a safe environment in his dental practice and reducing apprehension upon coming to his practice.

Episode Highlights: 

• What’s your strategy or approach to re-opening?
• What changes do you think you will implement upon re-opening?
• Dr. Gill talks about how dentists are at an increased risk for contracting Covid-19, and discusses the increased precautionary measures they will be implementing.
• Some changes include increased PPE, plastic shields, face guards, and screening protocols
• Dr. Gill talks about how it can be difficult to know where to draw the line between being cautious and fearful.
• Are any staff hesitant to come back?
• Right now, Dr. Gill is seeing that his team is willing to come back to work, but understands that with 50 employees some things could change as they get closer to actually reopening.
• What is your strategy for PPE?
• What about practices that can’t afford to wait to open?
• If something like this happened again, what would you change?
• What outreach or communications are you sending out to your clienty/patients?
• Is there anything new you are deploying among your staff relating to work-flows or processes?
• It is important that his practice is safe and that his clients and employees feel safe.
• They plan to implement screenings, but do not yet know what that will look like.
• Is there anything else you are doing that you want to share?
• What is your take in terms of the next couple steps?
• Dr. Gill believes there will be a pent up demand for dental services when practices can reopen.
• Dr. Gill wants his processes to be tight but also understands he will need to be flexible to change them as needed.
• What are you doing with your time off?
• Dr. Gill practices dentistry 2 days a week, and works more on growing the business at this point.

3 Key Points:

1. It is important to make sure that both patients and employees feel safe coming to the dental practice.
2. There is a lot of uncertainty surrounding what reopening will look like, and Dr. Gill is waiting to hear more information from the governing bodies.
3. Dentists are very technically trained, but also need to be in tune with their clients.

Tweetable Quotes: 

• “One of the keys for us is to make sure that we’re being smart about it, we’re protecting our people, we’re protecting our patients, but we’re not going to get driven into a fear driven situation.” -Dr. Sunny Gill
• “You gotta start thinking about things differently than you did before.” -Dr. Sunny Gill
• “I think that’s going to be the major point for any dental practice to make sure you are relieving your patients of any apprehensions they may have around returning for dental care.” -Dr. Sunny Gill
• “At the end of the day as a dentist practice owner you wear a ton of hats and each one of them is very demanding.” -Dr. Sunny Gill
• “Facts don’t matter as much as stories do. Story tellers really do run the universe, and so your story matters a lot.” -Dr. Sunny Gill

Resources Mentioned: 

• Dr. Sunny Gill’s LinkedIn
• HealthOne Medical Group
• City Dental