Offering Appointments to Secondary that Want Primary

This Scheduling Coordinator resource document provides explanation of how to save a block in your dental schedule, while still providing a patient appointment times they want.

Verbal Skills Of How To Handle Secondary Appointments Wanting Primary Times

When trying to build a productive schedule, we don’t want to fill up the schedule with a lot of little appointments. By doing this, we end up with a lot of small appointments scattered all over the day and no room to put primary appointments.

With Block Scheduling or Productive Scheduling, we want to hold the blocks we have for primary appointments but that can be hard when you have a patient that needs a secondary appointment who wants that time of day or that particular day and it falls within that primary block time. It is ok to tell the patient that wants that day and time, we don’t have that day/time available, but if something opens up then we will call them to try to move them.

I am not in favor of scripts or using scripts in the dental office; however, the best way to demonstrate this is to use an example. Below is an example of how this looks:

Staff: “Is there a day and time of the week that works best for you to schedule one filling?”

Patient: “I would like around 10:30 on Tuesdays or lunchtime on Thursdays”

View the complete document and print out a copy for your office below!