When patients are “in the chair” three senses become strongly active, especially for those who are nervous or tense. These are:
1. Smell
2. Touch
3. Hearing
That’s why I’d like to address the importance of having a musical therapy strategy for your dental practice. And surprisingly, it’s not just your patients who benefit from a well thought out background music strategy. Your staff will as well.
After speaking with numerous dentists, it’s become very clear that many practitioners do not have a plan regarding the best types of music to play in their offices. This is unfortunate.
For example, many dentists still utilize the following:
· FM Radio
· Satellite Radio
· CDs
While these options may seem to make sense, none of them give you complete freedom and control over what your patients are listening to. After all, when you go to a restaurant and order food, do you let the waiter decide what you should eat? Of course not. Instead, you make a specific effort to order the most satisfying meal based on your individual dietary needs and tastes. The same goes for your dental practice, and the use of music within it.
So, let me give you 3 tips to maximize the effectiveness of music in your dental office in the interest of making the experience as positive and relaxing as possible for your patients:
1) Strike a Balance
The biggest mistake I see dentists making is that the music they play for their patients is the same music that can be heard by the staff handling administrative duties.
This is a big mistake.
While certain subscription services dentists utilize may play music that’s appropriate for patients, it may not be suitable for staff that are not directly involved in patient procedures.
Would you want your administrative staff listening to relaxing music? Probably not, right? After all, you want them motivated and energetic, not drowsy.
Also, you will want your patients to listen to music that will soothe them and distract them from their potential discomfort. What you don’t want is heart-pumping music that may lead to feelings of anxiety.
So, the solution is simple: Ensure you have one sound system set up for your clinical rooms, and another sound system set up for your administrative areas.
Your waiting area should also have the same music as your clinical rooms. After all, you want your patients to be relaxed from the second they walk in, to the time they leave.
2) Patient Music Considerations
When it comes to relaxing your patients, your first line of defense should always be their auditory sense.
Because of this, you want to totally eliminate distractions such as unwanted advertisements, disc jockey announcements, or any static and unwanted interference.
Ideally, each of your patient rooms should have surround sound and a perfect signal. Something as simple as using an iPod with pre-selected music is a great way to accomplish this.
If you’ve ever visited a spa, you know that a large emphasis is placed on setting the mood with a carefully selected playlist of soothing music. Your playlist and sound setup should be no different.
3) Staff Music Considerations
You want to ensure your staff is listening to music with at least 120 BPMs (Beats Per Minute), but no more than 150 BPMs. You can easily use Google to find songs like this.
This tempo is a great start for keeping your staff in an energetic and productive mindset. Of course, you’ll want to avoid music with explicit content or anything that could be considered graphic in nature. Furthermore, for intensive mental work, lyrics that are too prominent are destructive to mental focus.
Research shows that “intelligible” chatter—talking that can be clearly heard and understood—contributes strongly to a distracting environment. Shifting focus to figure out what someone else is saying is the reason why speech is often considered the most troublesome element of a noisy office. In one study, 48% of participants listed intelligible talking as the sound which distracted them the most.
Trying to engage in language-related tasks, such as writing, while listening to lyrics would be akin to holding a conversation while another person talks over you… while also strumming a guitar. So lyrics are often a no-go in these situations.
Lyrics might not have the same effect on creative tasks that don’t directly deal with “verbal architecture”. This study, which looked at software developers, suggested that music with lyrics might actually have helped their output while working.
The bottom line is to find the right balance of music to effectively match the kinds of activities that take place in the administrative areas of your practice.
4) Long Playlist versus Short Playlists
The last consideration is the size of your music playlist. While not a real concern for patients, since the duration of their visits are limited, it does affect your staff, both in patient and administrative areas.
There is a debate between whether employees benefit more from shorter music playlists that create predictability, or longer playlists that minimize musical redundancy.
On one side, musical therapists agree that shorter playlists add predictability and less confusion in a working environment. However, repetition can lead to boredom, and eventually, to measurable levels of stress.
Once again, the key is to find the right playlist length for music to best serve the activities of your practice’s patient care and administrative staff.
