Near-Perfect Patient Perception
The critical non-essentials that drive success
We use business as a force for good to help people live healthier, happier and more fulfilled lives.
At Glendair Dental Practice in Alfreton, that looks like flowers arriving for a patient who mentioned they’d had a hard week. Or a phone call the next day, not about the treatment, just to check they’re ok.
None of it is required. None of it is charged for. All of it is why Glendair has returned a patient NPS of 99 and a team satisfaction score of 100.
Bev Harston, Clinic Manager, has a name for these things, borrowed from the Australian dentist Paddy Lund. Critical non-essentials. The small moments, as she puts it, that they keep popping in there.
We partner with clinics like Glendair because they had already worked this out. Our job is to give them the room and the resource to keep going.
A person-first approach
Ask Ruth, Glendair’s Treatment Co-ordinator, what the practice does differently and she doesn’t start with process.
“We look after them as people first and foremost. They’re people in their own right, and we look after them like we’d look after if my mum was coming in.”
What follows is adaptability rather than a script. Every patient walks through the door at a different level of comfort, and the job is to read it. That takes curiosity - understanding the person in front of you before deciding what they need.
So the list of small things is long, and deliberately unexpected:
- If a patient has a denture, it gets a quick clean during their dental health check
- A row of flavoured toothpastes, so patients choose their own after a hygiene appointment
- The patient’s favourite music, offered as a choice
- Social history notes, so the team know what’s going on in someone’s life
- Birthday cards and emails - flowers for the special ones
- Flowers or a card when a patient says they’ve had a bad week
- A thank-you card for every new patient
- A follow-up call the next day
That thank-you card is worth pausing on. Bev’s reasoning: “They could have chose anybody, could have chose any practice. But they chose ours, and we’re grateful for that.”
And the follow-up call does two jobs at once. It’s a kindness, and it’s quality assurance - a check that the patient went away with everything they needed to make an informed choice.
Same journey, different person
Consistency of care is easy to promise and hard to deliver. Glendair’s answer was to go and watch each other work.
“We’ve all gone into each other’s rooms and watched a dental health check happen. We’re not making the dentists like robots. We don’t take away their personality, but the process follows the same format. So it doesn’t matter who you see, the treatment is exactly the same. It’s just the person that’s different.”
It cost them nothing but time, and it solved a problem that most groups try to fix with a policy document. Resourceful, in the truest sense - improving what was already there rather than importing something new.
The result is an absence rather than a presence. “We don’t get complaints about Kate did this, but Anna hasn’t done it.”
Bev’s framing of why this matters is the sharpest line in the conversation:
“Anyone would be foolish to think that patients don’t notice. It’s the value of the appointment. As soon as something’s different, the value’s gone.”
That is professional pride made practical. It shows in the work.
One hundred per cent team satisfaction
Helping teams live healthier, happier lives is why we do what we do. Glendair have gone further with it than most.
Asked for the one thing another manager could take away, Ruth doesn’t hesitate. The Team Charter.
Crucially, management didn’t write it. The team did.
“What does a Glendarian look like? What constitutes a good day? What constitutes a bad day? What constitutes good attitude, bad attitude?”
It isn’t a disciplinary document. “It’s not a stick to beat anybody with. It empowers them to recognise someone who isn’t doing it.”
In practice, the team holds its own standard, and the sense of hierarchy disappears. Everyone is trusted to hold everyone else to account - which only works in a place where people are comfortable debating ideas and then committing to what’s agreed.
Alongside it sits a set of things that cost very little:
- A thank-you wall. A sheet anyone can write on - thank you for covering my on-call, thank you for sorting my appointment book, thank you for passing my instruments when I was running late.
- Star of the month. Voted by the team, with a written reason on a post-it. Jodie collects them and turns them into a book at Christmas.
- The Wall of Why. When you start at Glendair, you send in a photo of the person or the thing that got you here, and why you come to work. It hangs on the stairs coming down from lunch, so you see it on the way back.
- Open team meetings. Everyone contributes to the agenda, and marketing stats and policy updates are presented by the people who own them.
Never resting on your laurels
The easy version of this story is a practice where everyone is lovely all the time. We know that isn’t realistic, and neither does Bev.
“Glendair is not for everybody. We work hard - really hard, but we’re rewarded by that in the little ways that matter most.”
She’s equally direct about the score itself.
“I would not say it is 100% perfect, because absolutely it is not. We will take every bit of feedback from that employee survey and every bit of feedback from patients, and we will try and change and continually evolve.”
That, more than any single gesture, is the thing worth copying. Not the flowers or the toothpaste - the refusal to treat a good result as a finished job.
It’s also the clearest expression of our culture of CARE we could point to. Curious about what each patient actually needs. Accountable to each other, without a hierarchy to hide behind. Resourceful enough to solve real problems with a sheet of paper and a photograph on a wall. And excellent by choice, every appointment, whoever is delivering it.
Culture isn’t something we installed at Glendair. It was already there, built over decades, written down by the people who live it, and held to by a team who would notice immediately if it slipped.
Because growth should strengthen a practice, not change who it is.
Thinking about your next chapter? Every great partnership starts with a conversation.