Post-Covid vs. Peri-Covid

Episode #335 with Dr. Kevin Kwiecien

If you’ve needed an excuse to make changes to your practice, now is the perfect time! Covid-19 brought with it many tragedies, but also opportunities. To offer some perspective on what this means for dentists, Kirk Behrendt brings in Dr. Kevin Kwiecien from The Pankey Institute to reflect on this past year of the pandemic. He explains some of the benefits of this time that he calls peri-Covid, and also reminds us that we are not post-Covid just yet! To hear about the changes you can make and why now is the best time for them, listen to Episode 335 of The Best Practices Show!

Main Takeaways:

As of today, we are still not post-Covid. We are very peri-Covid.

Peri-Covid is an opportunity to talk about health.

It’s also an opportunity to make changes to your practice. 

Patients are more amenable to change during peri-Covid. Use this to your advantage!

Practice the three P’s: predictability, progress, and purpose.

Quotes:

“If you've been pregnant, or have a partner who’s been pregnant, or anybody in the world that's been pregnant, we talk about prenatal vitamins, prenatal care, prenatal this. Then, we’ve got postnatal as you're healing. Even if you look at Peloton right now, they’ve got postnatal yoga and things like that. And, of course, when you're pregnant, you are perinatal. And people always say “post-Covid.” And I'm like, no. There was pre-Covid. We certainly haven't hit post-Covid yet. We’re now over a year-and-a-half peri-Covid. And we thought we were getting to post-Covid, but we’re still quite peri-Covid.” (07:34—08:12)

“People thinking, ‘Oh, no. We’re post-Covid now,’ I'm like, it’s a different mentality. You're still in it, and what does that look like for you? When you're pregnant the first month, it feels one way and you like being pregnant. And probably, when the pandemic started, some of you liked the Netflix binging and the forced hanging out at home, especially after you got the PPP loan and the EIDL loan. But then, when you're in your seventh month of pregnancy, you're like, ‘Have I not had this kid yet?’ And now, we’re in the — I don't even know what month we’re at — 16, 17, 18 months of being pregnant with Covid, and we’re all ready to be post-Covid. But we’re not. We’re still peri-Covid.” (08:17—09:03)

“This peri-Covid time that we’re in in the 18th month of pregnancy, the pressure is still there. And it might even be worse because we feel like we’re close to the end, and yet there are dentists who are still looking for associates. Most dentists right now are looking for team members. That's the biggest stress right now across the country, how do you find a good team member right now. It’s that scarcity mentality right now. It’s, you don't have to be in scarcity mentality, but how do you realize that you're in scarcity mentality, how do you manage it, and how do you move on with hope and abundance mentality versus scarcity mentality. And that's a lot of the conversations we’re having lately.” (11:01—11:56)

“There's a reason that we decide how we want energy and information to flow through the office. As I say, how energy and information flows through the office optimally with intention. We've decided how that looks for us so that when there's a little glitch, we still know what optimal looks like. That's predictability, but it takes work. And the progress, for me, it’s every day, what is the small little shift, the tiniest thing that you can do so that you don't do exactly what you did yesterday. What's the teeniest, tiniest, shift? Because that's progress.” (16:47—17:27)

“A lot of practices, I'm guessing it’s the majority, meaning over 50%, if they look at their checkbook, pre-Covid, and they look at their checkbook now, it’s probably more now. And so, they had...