You can't use your clinical skills unless you're given the opportunity to use them — and that opportunity starts with effective communication.
Efficiency: Listening carefully and asking excellent questions are the fastest ways to discover what information matters most to each individual patient. When you understand what they actually need, you can focus your explanations and recommendations efficiently.
Reducing confusion and information overload:
Spending more time listening at the start of a consultation makes the conversation at the end shorter, clearer, and more productive. Bombarding patients with large amounts of information at the end — in an attempt to persuade them — often overwhelms or confuses them.
Remember: stressed or confused patients don't absorb information, and confused patients don't say "yes."
Old paradigm: small pre-exam discussion → exam → consultation
New paradigm: big pre-exam discussion → exam → consultation
Small talk isn't the same as rapport. Patients connect with professionals who show genuine curiosity, listen well, and ask thoughtful questions — not just those who are "nice."
"I don't care what you know until I know that you care."
Effective communication helps you be remembered as professional, trustworthy, and compassionate — the qualities patients seek in a clinician. Just as you wouldn't expect to spend 20 minutes chatting socially with your lawyer, patients appreciate focus, empathy, and efficiency from their dentist.
Rapport grows from how you listen, not how long you talk.
These skills aren't about sales or marketing — they're about enabling you to use your clinical expertise to its fullest. The better your communication, the more opportunities you'll have to provide appropriate treatment and deliver great outcomes. This naturally leads to greater job satisfaction and confidence in your professional role.
Health literacy is more than language ability — it's the combination of cognitive and social skills that determine a person's ability to understand and use health information to maintain good health.
Many patients with poor oral health also have low health literacy, regardless of their language skills. Adjusting your communication style, not just your vocabulary, is what helps patients understand and engage with their care.
Improving your communication skills directly improves your patients' understanding, acceptance, and trust — and supports better oral health outcomes.
Even the most capable clinicians can struggle to adopt new communication approaches. The barriers are often rooted in beliefs, habits, and confidence rather than skill.
Many dentists are trained — and culturally expected — to be the expert in control. This can make it hard to embrace a more collaborative approach where the dentist brings the knowledge, and the patient brings the context. Effective communication means guiding the conversation, not dominating it.
Diagnosis is built on curiosity. The quality of a patient's answer depends on the quality of the dentist's questions.
If a patient says, "My tooth broke," repairing it solves one problem — but asking why it broke may reveal the real cause (like chewing frozen lollies). Deeper questioning leads to better care.
Patients rarely make decisions purely on logic. Behavioural science shows that emotion, fear, and past experiences strongly shape choices. Understanding this helps you support change rather than push against resistance.
Many clinicians fear that using communication techniques will make them sound fake or manipulative. In reality, communication is a learned clinical skill, just like hand skills. Becoming more mindful of how your words and tone affect others doesn't change who you are — it enhances your professionalism.
Lasting change comes from combining:
Knowledge + Vision + Skill + Confidence
Learners need clear definitions, a sense of "what's in it for me," safe opportunities to practise, and the confidence to try new approaches. Communication, like dentistry, is best learned through practice — not perfection.
Improving communication isn't about changing your personality — it's about expanding your effectiveness. When you ask better questions, listen deeply, and understand behaviour, your clinical skills have more opportunity to shine.
Understanding how people learn can make developing communication skills faster, deeper, and more lasting. The principles below come from the science of learning — particularly from the book Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning.
Simply recalling information strengthens it. Each time you retrieve a concept from memory, it becomes easier to recall again later.
That means practice and repetition over time are far more effective than rereading or passive review.
💡 Tip: Space your practice out — and make it a little challenging. The effort required to recall information is what makes the learning stick.
Testing isn't just for assessment — it's one of the best ways to interrupt forgetting.
Even small challenges, like filling in a missing word or summarising a concept without looking at your notes, help cement learning. This is called the generation effect — your brain remembers what it actively reconstructs.
Immediate feedback feels helpful but can create dependency — like using training wheels when learning to ride a bike.
When learners have time to reflect before feedback, they process errors more deeply and retain learning longer.
Too many interruptions can also disrupt performance and make it harder to develop a consistent pattern.
💡 Tip: Let learners make and explore small mistakes before correcting them — it builds true confidence and independence.
Our working memory is limited. Worrying about being wrong or about how others perceive us consumes mental space that could be used for thinking and recall.
Learners who see mistakes as part of learning, not failure, perform better and retain more. Penalising errors or creating fear of failure can block deeper understanding.
The most effective exam or skill preparation is doing and testing, not rereading.
Active retrieval — explaining, practising, or teaching — moves information into long-term memory and builds confidence to use it in real-world settings.
Improving communication skills works the same way: learn it, try it, test it, and reflect.
The more you retrieve and apply what you learn, the more natural and effective your communication becomes.