Transforming the Ordinary into the Exceptional

Transforming the Ordinary into the Exceptional

October 14, 2025 at 4:00 AM

by Kathleen Bokrossy

Every day, we have an opportunity to turn something ordinary into something truly memorable.

For dental hygienists, that moment often happens during what many might see as a routine hygiene visit. But what if the recall appointment didn’t feel routine — for your patient or for you? What if it became a meaningful touchpoint for trust, transformation, and elevated care

That’s exactly what we’ll be exploring at our upcoming Boutique-Style Conference at the Dentsply Sirona Academy in Mississauga, Ontario, on Saturday, November 15th. This immersive day is designed to break away from “business as usual” and reimagine how we deliver care.

With the expertise of Dr. Tim Donley, Beth Ryerse-Donley, RDH, and Dani Botbyl, RDH, we’ll dive into:

- Clinical strategies that elevate outcomes

- Communication mastery that inspires trust and action

- Instrumentation precision that enhances both patient comfort and clinician confidence

You’ll leave with practical, ready-to-implement blueprints from each session, to bring back to your practice—transforming everyday visits into extraordinary experiences.

This week’s reflection:

Transformation begins with awareness. Before you can elevate the patient experience, you have to see it through their eyes.

To support that reflection, I’ve included a Patient Experience Worksheet — a simple but powerful tool designed to help you and your team see your practice through your patients’ eyes.

This resource includes three exercises:

Assessment: A structured review of your current patient journey — before, during, and after the appointment — to identify what’s working well and where small cracks might exist.
Current Experience Narrative: A blank worksheet where each team member walks through the entire journey as if they were the patient today, capturing what they see, feel, and experience in real time.
Dream Come True Experience: A blank worksheet to reimagine the ideal patient journey — what it could look like if every touchpoint reflected your highest level of care, service, and hospitality.

This simple but powerful reflection often reveals your quiet “broken windows” — those subtle cracks that, if caught early, can be turned into opportunities to create an exceptional patient experience.

Set the tone first: make it a safe space for open sharing — no judgement, just curiosity and growth. Then compare your observations as a team. This exercise often reveals your quiet “broken windows” — the small cracks in the patient journey that may be easy to overlook when you’re busy in the day-to-day.

Think of it like a small chip in a windshield. If you catch it early, it’s quick and inexpensive to fix. But if ignored, that little chip spreads — eventually taking over the whole windshield and becoming much more costly to repair. The same is true for patient experience. A missed greeting, a clunky check-in, a lack of follow-up — these tiny cracks can expand into something that impacts your entire practice culture and patient perception.

Catch the chip early. Repair it while it’s small. Protect the clarity of your entire windshield — and your patient experience.

Join us on Saturday, November 15th at the 3rd Annual rdhu Boutique-Style Conference to turn this reflection into action, strategy, and transformation.