Planning a New Medical Office Space
Office designs are changing with time. With the ever-evolving needs of the business sectors, and owners and clients preferences, practice design and configuration has gone through some significant changes over the past years. Whether you are trying a dental office construction or dental office renovation, the office plan plays a major role in ensuring your dental practice. It may affect the flow of clients, the attraction of new clients, and reputation in the society among other things. It may as well affect your dental practice as far as how you and your assistant perform your duties. In addition, it may be a factor to affect the efficiency of your staff by either motivating or demotivating them. Therefore, it is important to have a dental office design that positively affects the staff performance by increasing their efficiency as well as making the patients feel secure, comfortable and confident that their privacy is protected.
Due to these reasons, dentists and orthodontists must be very careful when planning and designing their office space if they want to stay ahead and keep up with the changing trends in the dental industry. Therefore, there are some factors that they are supposed to consider before setting up their offices so as to come up with a competent dental office design. They include but not limited to:
Office location
While all factors are important, one factor that affects all other factors is location. The first three considerations when planning an office space should always be location, location, and location. Where you plan to set up your dental office will determine your success in many ways.
The location should always be easily accessible to the patients. Don’t look for a location that will be too hard to locate even from online mapping programs like Google Maps. It should be easy for a client to locate and also refer other clients.
It is also advisable that you locate your dental clinic at the center of residences and not too remote. At least make sure that the location has enough population to draw enough clients with dental problems. The best way to locate such a place is taking a Google map and circumscribing a circle around the target residence and locating your office somewhere at the center of the circle. Transport availability and parking in your location for commuting patients are also important.
Office size
Another important factor that will greatly affect your office planning is the size. How much office space do you need? How many offices will be built in? How many square feet are required for every room? It is important to note that when you have a bigger space, you will be able to plan your office better. However, do not overlook the idea of misusing space. If space is misused, the costs will be more when renovating the dental office and trying to expand. Check on that.
Dental equipment
Some dental equipment have specifications that make them suited for specific room designs. If not properly considered, you may find that after planning your office, you will have to restructure so as to accommodate some equipment. Always ensure you know what goes where so that you can plan your office space around your equipment. This way you will not have to deal with unpleasant surprises of having rooms that have been partitioned too tightly for some equipment.
