Dental appointments explained: the lowdown on Taiwan’s dental system
Have you ever thought about the difference between a dental surgery and other doctors’ clinics? At most clinics in Taiwan, you can just walk in and sit down in the waiting room, joining the queue to see the doctor immediately. But dentists work differently. Most require you to book an appointment in advance – often by phone. Why is that? And if you have an urgent toothache, what’s the right thing to do? Should you book an appointment for next week, or is it OK to walk into the nearest dental clinic and ask to be seen today? Well, we spoke to some of Taiwan’s prominent dentists, to get the lowdown on this sometimes mystifying system.
When you need a dental issue fixed, you’re meant to ring the clinic and book an appointment. Booking in advance is a standard procedure these days, as this member of the public explains.
Member of public
You know, if you have a real toothache, it can be quite inconvenient.
Some people wonder why normal medical clinics let you simply rock up, take a number, and wait your turn, while dental clinics want you to pre-book an appointment. It seems the two systems are dramatically different. Why?
Wen Ssu-yung
Taipei Dental Association
Dental treatment is usually one very small-scale operation. A complex treatment might take one or two hours. But the majority of treatments take 20 to 30 minutes.
More and more clinics are adopting the procedure of first talking to the patient to find out what’s wrong, and then arranging an appointment so they hopefully don’t have to wait too long in the waiting room, or impact other patients’ rights. But if you have a toothache right now, do you still need to book in advance? Well, not necessarily. In genuinely exceptional circumstances, you may be allowed to skip the queue.
Huang Yi-hao
Dental clinic director
Usually that’s when the decay has reached the dental nerve, and the face is starting to swell. When you have cellulitis or something like that, then it’s definitely reached the point of a dental emergency.
Treating an acute toothache cannot be delayed. Alongside normal dental clinics, hospital ERs can also provide help in such cases.
Huang Yi-hao
Dental clinic director
When there’s really, absolutely, no other solution, you can go to a hospital emergency room. Yeah. The dentists have shifts – I used to be a hospital dentist.
Wen Ssu-yung
Taipei Dental Association
When you have a toothache, sometimes you really can take painkillers first. I think that dentists in every clinic are willing to treat a patient who is willing to wait in the waiting room.
Dentists say that the main difficulty is the large number of regular hygiene treatments they have booked most days. If you want to avoid getting the kind of toothache that requires emergency treatment and impacts other patients, by far the best policy is to discover any dental issues early, and get them treated as soon as possible.
2023-06-26
