 Hello, everybody. Andrea Trosky here with Dental L Tutoring. Hopefully you guys like my sweater. It's the holidays. It's kind of hard to see, isn't it? Isn't this adorable? I love it. Anyway, so just in case you're wondering what I'm wearing, I am wearing a holiday sweater. So anyways, so I would like to talk to you guys about clinic, about clinic. So this is for the student who's either starting clinic or you're starting school and you're like, oh my gosh, I am so nervous to start working on my student partners and then to have to start working on like actual patients. Or this is even for those who are in clinic now but can't seem to get organized. Now, first off though, I do have to say that every school is different. So some of the tips that I'm offering may not work for your school if you do things a little bit differently. As an example, when I was a student, I was allowed to purchase my charts ahead of time. So what we usually did was we would, I can't remember the price, but every patient that we saw, we had to put down a certain amount for every new patient. So let's say, and again, I can't remember the exact price, but let's say for a new patient, they had to pay $20. So I would actually pay that $20 ahead of time and then ask the patient to pay me. And then I would give them the receipt showing them that I did pay. I did that for a couple of reasons. I did that hoping that they would actually show up. So I did pay for some of my patients. If they had said, well, I don't have the money, but I would love to be your patient, then I did pay for them only if I really, really needed a patient. But if I wasn't paying for them, that's how I would still do things. I would pay for their chart first so that I could take the chart home and look through it. All of the paperwork, of course, hasn't been filled out yet, but I would ask the patient's questions over the phone saying, give me your full name. We had to know their name, address, city. And then I would talk about their medical history over the phone. Now, I don't know though, if you're allowed to do that, it depends on the school. So you might not be allowed to purchase their charts ahead of time and you may not be allowed to take them home. I don't know. But it's nice to be able to get as much done as possible before that patient's in the chair, as much as you can. You obviously can't talk about oral hygiene instruction because you haven't looked inside the mouth yet. You can't do any of the intraoral and the extra oral stuff because you aren't seeing them in front of you yet, right? But talking about their name, city, their number, their email and the medical history, you can do beforehand, right? So I would actually do that beforehand to save me time when I got to clinic because this is usually the same in them every single school where you would have to get all of that done and then wait. Wait and wait for a teacher to come over and mark it or for a teacher to come over, ask the patient questions, sign off, and then you can move on. Whereas if I could have that done first and then I would call the patient, I would have them in. I would make sure with them that I filled out everything properly and then say, okay, I'm all set, but some teachers didn't like that. Some didn't want me to do it ahead of time. So then I was back to square one anyway and I couldn't do it ahead of time. So it depends on your school, but if you're able to get it done ahead of time, it does help so much because it probably saves you at least an hour of you asking them questions in clinic because that time can be spent moving on, right? And as I said earlier, even if you have everything done, you still have to wait for the instructor to have a look and then mark everything, right? And if there's 20, 30 people in clinic, you might be sitting around for one hour waiting anyway. So it's kind of nice to have it done ahead of time. So that's kind of the main thing that I did off the bat just to help to get things moving plus if your patient's on a lot of medications, it's nice to know them ahead of time so you can look them up on the internet. So A, you know how to spell them. And so you know the signs, symptoms, interactions, and what they're for because a lot of patients will tell you that they're on a medication, but they don't even know what it's for. And then you look it up and it's like, oh, they have a heart condition. They didn't tell me they had a heart condition that's kind of important because as a student, that medical history and the dental history is the most important because if you get anything wrong, your teacher will likely mark you incorrect and then you fail that whole patient. So here you know that you've already failed but you have to move on and keep up with it, right? Depending on the school, you might fail the whole patient or only that certain part. So it's nice to look up things ahead of time because as a student, you don't know everything. You don't know all of the medications so it's nice to look things up ahead of time. So try that if you're able to. If you're in clinic now and you're stuck on something else, let me know and I might be able to help you sort of move through it a little bit easier or how I can sort of teach you guys to do some things ahead of time, okay? Because it's been a while since I've been in an actual school clinic so I might not be remembering certain things so please let me know and I'm happy to help. So good luck. I know that clinic is stressful. I've been there, done that. Good luck. If I can help you, please just let me know.