Photo: Daniel Schwarz | Blackyfiedography
The passionate senior dentist Dr. Volkmar Göbel has been running a dental practice in Gössenheim since 1988 and has developed an innovative mobile treatment concept with DENTagil, which relies on his expertise and the team’s highly committed commitment. The photo series and the interview provide insights into the work of the DENTagil team.
Mr. Dr. Göbel, how did you decide to specialize in mobile dental care for older people?
My grandmother gave me the impetus. At the time, she was living in a senior citizens’ facility and told me about her defective dentures, for which no one there felt responsible. I became aware that people who can no longer travel to a practice are underserved by dentists in Germany. This necessity gave birth to the basic idea for my concept of mobile geriatric dentistry.
What are the biggest challenges in providing outpatient dental care to older people?
The biggest challenges are not the distances and route planning to the patients or the required equipment – the challenges are putting together the teams and finding suitable employees. Mobile geriatric dentistry is not your usual classic dental profession – there are a lot of us closer and more holistic to the patient. The people in care facilities need much more than dental care as we know it from practice – it’s more about always keeping an eye on the patients’ overall mental and motor constitution and creating a situation for them in their home environment in which they feel comfortable and can be treated well. We install the practice, including all devices, directly in the patient’s room and are there in their private and intimate space.
This requires special empathy and understanding, especially from the DENTagil team. As a whole, we must learn to see our dental thinking, our dental treatment and our dental practice with “old eyes”. We are urgently looking for more dentists who can help even more immobile people with a team – because the demand for our concept is very high.
You have introduced innovative technologies such as mobile X-ray machines and digitalized equipment in your practice to enable fully comprehensive mobile treatment. What role do technological advances play in improving mobile patient care?
In order to develop equally patient-centered and quality-oriented oral medicine and its conception also for patients who are visited, a rethinking on several levels is required from the practitioner’s perspective. To do this, the process descriptions of a dental practice must be transformed into a high-tech location for mobile treatment. A digital workflow offers significant advantages for everyone involved in a mobile dental practice. This includes, among other things, the use of laptops, digital X-rays with imaging plates or a sensor, intraoral cameras and an intraoral scanner for imaging teeth and producing prostheses using the printing process. The use of several mobile treatment units and an appropriately configured container system corresponds to the basic equipment. Ultimately, and this is the most important thing, we can offer a comprehensive, digital, preventive and interdisciplinary methodology for our patients, with the maximum treatment portfolio with the lowest possible burden.
Were there any particular challenges within your team in relation to the development and implementation of your concept?
Mobile dental treatment was always a becoming, never a being. The jointly developed concept is still subject to a constant dynamic of improvement and therefore requires a permanent willingness to learn with appropriate communication within the team. There are still no teaching concepts or further guidelines; For this reason, I had the mobile practice certified according to ISO 9001 in 2016. In this way, I can ensure a defined level of quality and thus process-based security in the provision of services for my teams. Without my committed, creative, but also critical and resilient team, this concept would not have come about. Over time it has also become clear that not every member can endure and process this sometimes extreme human closeness; It has always been and is an open-ended learning and empathy process for this special activity.
Exemplary commitment recognized: At the end of February, Dr. Göbel received the Bavarian Constitutional Order for his commitment to mobile dental care for older people.
This article is in the ZWP Dentist Business Practice appeared.
