Dispensing Integration

So How Do You Take Great Ideas From Courses and Turn Them Into Real Dispensing Opportunities? Here are a number of ways that a colleague has found having recently attended both the QED & CCC workshops:

Ask for clients to bring their list of medications with them
Use the question “What concerns do you have?”
Allay anxieties early in the consultation regarding what is going to happen and the price of hearing aids
Quote the full range of prices
Use stories to draw out clients’ feelings related to not hearing
Use negative vocabulary to elicit these feelings in the consultation
Use stories to illustrate the changes in people’s lives once they do aid their hearing
Use positive vocabulary to elicit these feelings in the consultation.
Ask “Has it got worse in the last year to two years?”
Use the warble tone box to create concern before audiometry
Spend more time on otoscopy and the explanation.
Give more weight to what I tell clients by using phrases like: “I’m interested to see / hear / find out..,” “What concerns me..,” “I can now understand…”
Be more direct with statements like: “You need to take your hearing more seriously than you are.” “Hearing loss can become a crippling disability and it usually does get progressively worse over time.” “As with any medical condition, it’s better to address this sooner rather than later.”
Show and explain the audiogram before audiometry to build anticipation and concern over the result.
Don’t say “Well done” when the headphones come off. Instead, say “Ok, the moment of truth”
Possibly use the warble tone box to consolidate audiometric results more dramatically for the support
Give people a copy of their speech test to take home with errors clearly marked
Talk about a 3 month evaluation period (not trial period)
Tell returning clients how many hours of use they will have had from their old aids
Emphasise that the return on investment in a new hearing system is every waking hour and that they cannot afford not to do something about it.

Get both my receptionist and teleappointer to sit in on tests a.s.a.p.
Tell them to ask clients who is most concerned about their hearing and ask them to bring that person for support
Look critically at the waiting and testing environments
Write out the plan of my consultation with key words and expressions
Record my consultation

Thanks for all your input. It was a great course.