Kayley Rooney is the Practice Manager at Evodental’s Liverpool headquarters, which means she does a bit of everything, from admin and answering sales enquiries to fielding patient questions. In fact she spends a lot of time talking to patients, hearing their stories and listening to their concerns. It’s about getting to know them as people, Kayley says, and it’s what she likes most.
An exciting, lifechanging journey
“It’s all about the patients and helping them through this exciting journey” says Kayley. “We’ve had patients who were really young, in their early 30s, who have become recluses because of the state of their teeth. They won’t go out, date, drive or have any sort of life.
“Then we see them a year after the procedure and they’re like different people. They go out for meals. They live life to the full again.”
A last resort
Kayley has been at Evodental Liverpool for six years and has met hundreds of people like that. These aren’t people with toothache; these are men and women of every age whose teeth – it’s no exaggeration to say – are ruining their lives.
“When they pick up the phone and talk to us it’s often a last resort,” she says.
“They’re scared and embarrassed. We have to realise that it’s taken a lot for them to just pick up the phone.”
“Even after the initial consultation patients will often have lots of questions that they didn’t feel they could ask the surgeon. It might be about finance options or the surgery schedule, or it might be more basic than that: ‘Will it hurt, what will my teeth look like?’ I can reassure them, and I can even arrange to have a former patient chat to them about any concerns they may have.”
A new smile, a new life
Kayley says that many of Evodental’s patients have avoided a general dentists for years, due to embarrassment at the state of their teeth or because of a genuine dental phobia. Her job is to get them to trust her enough to open up. She quickly reassures them that what they might see as unnatural or embarrassing is all in a day’s work at Evodental.
“I tell them that we see patients like them every day – and we really do. They feel like they’re not normal. I tell them it’s perfectly normal for us.”
One thing Kayley regularly says to patients is that making an appointment with Evodental is the first day of the rest of their lives. It’s a cliché, but it’s true. A patient might be reclusive, or someone whose self-esteem has hit rock bottom. They might be someone who hasn’t eaten properly for years because of bad teeth and whose health has suffered as a result.
And at the other end of the journey, after treatments that are usually quicker, less uncomfortable and easier than they ever imagined, she’s seen those people emerge like butterflies from a cocoon, stronger, more confident and brimming with health and life.
“I really see the difference this treatment makes and that’s the key,” she says. “You have to make new patients believe they can have that happy ending too. And I know they can because I see it every day.”
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