According to the original site, to the Average Joe, a dental chair could seemingly be purchased at the local furniture store. To the professional dentist meanwhile, it’s almost their pride and joy – arguably one of the most important features of their office.
For dentists new to the profession, the aim might be to seemingly get the patient seated as comfortable as possible as they perform emergency dental services such as dental implants, tooth extraction, etc,. However, any seasoned dentist will tell you that this is not completely the case and if you are searching for dental chairs for your practice, read on to find out some of the key considerations.
Put your own comfort ahead of the patients
This might sound like an absolutely absurd piece of advice on first look, but there is method in the madness. While you obviously have to take the comfort of your patients into account to an extent, you need to remember that as the dentist you will be hovering over it for much longer periods. There are procedures like all on 4 dental implants that are very beneficial to your patients, that could have you performing careful and precise movements for a longer time than you would think. While the typical patient might spend several minutes a year in the chair, this stretches into thousands of hours for the established dentist.
Therefore, make sure that whatever chair you purchase allows you to work with as little stress on your back as possible. Try and find a chair which enables you to lean over it with little effort. The design plays a big part in this and as there will be times where you will have to be in close proximity to the patient, you need something that allows you to reach over without any pain.
Good dental chairs rely on their adjustability
This is probably one of the more obvious suggestions that we’ll touch upon, with good dental chairs relying heavily on their adjustability. This revolves around numerous directions as well, whether it’s the headrest that is able to be used for patients of all shapes and sizes, or just the standard height of the chair which can allow you varying angles to operate from.
On this note we should probably add that most dentists find a swivel feature invaluable as well. This will allow you to operate around the patient’s head at your free will and without any restrictions that a fixed dental chair might have.
Small headrests promote even more accessibility
As you’ve probably gathered from the article so far, your primary aim should be to make the patient as accessible as possible to you. The next way we’re going to suggest which achieves this is via smaller headrests. This might seem to be a bizarre piece of advice, as large headrests have always been associated with increased comfort. However, we’ll again reiterate that this isn’t the primary consideration with dental chairs.
Instead, the smaller headrest will allow you to place the patients head in a number of positions. If you are left to deal with a bulky headrest, there’s every chance that it will actually hinder your own movement due to the support that it relies upon. If you can also turn to a headrest which has a double-articulating feature, you will be able to manipulate the patient’s head to a much greater extent as well.Again, it’s all about putting functionality above comfort – or at least finding a happy medium.
