Lesson 4: Drills That Are Worth Running

Ask an office when they last ran an emergency drill and you get one of three answers. A date several years ago, delivered with a small wince. Or "we talked about it at a staff meeting," which is a different activity. Or, most often, a pause followed by somebody saying they think they did one before the last hygienist left.

The wince is the useful one, because it tells you what happened. The drill was designed as a test of people. Somebody got asked a question in front of their colleagues and did not know the answer, the whole thing ran forty minutes past its slot, nobody wrote down what it revealed, and nothing changed. Of course it was never repeated. This lesson designs the opposite: short drills that put the building on trial instead of the team, produce written findings, and generate a fix everybody can see. Done that way they get repeated, which is the only property that matters.

Why the First Drill Is Usually the Last

Four causes, and all four are design problems rather than culture problems.

It was scheduled as a meeting. An hour on the calendar means an hour of preparation and a real cost to the schedule. That gets booked once. A five minute exercise attached to something already happening gets booked twenty times.

It quizzed people. Somebody was asked what they would do, in front of colleagues, and either did not know or got it wrong. Nobody volunteers for that twice, and the office quietly stops proposing it.

Nothing was written down. Findings lived in the conversation afterward and evaporated by Monday, so the drill produced no visible value and the next one looks like an hour with no return.

Nobody owned the next one. The drill was an event rather than a recurring item on a named person's calendar, and events do not recur by themselves.

Fix the design and the frequency problem solves itself. Short, frequent, non-judgmental and productive, in that order.

Test the Building, Not the Team's Memory

This is the whole idea, and it is worth stating bluntly.

A drill that asks "what would you do if" is a quiz. It measures recall, puts a person on the spot, and generates nothing you can act on except an uncomfortable silence.

A drill that says "go and get the AED, I am timing you" is a test of the building. The hallway either cooperates or it does not. The cabinet either opens easily or it does not. The door is either locked at that hour or it is not. Nobody is on trial, because the finding is a fact about the office rather than about a person.

That changes how findings get written, and the wording matters more than you would expect. "The supply room door is locked between twelve and one" is a fact somebody can fix this week. "Jenna did not know where the kit was" is a performance review nobody asked for, and it guarantees the next drill is met with folded arms.

Write every finding as a statement about the building, the equipment, the paperwork or the schedule. If a finding genuinely is about a gap in somebody's knowledge, that is an onboarding problem and it belongs in the training plan, not the drill log.

Three Drills That Fit Inside a Huddle

None of these takes longer than a few minutes. All of them can be attached to a huddle you already run, which is exactly why they survive. If your huddle needs rebuilding first, our morning huddle lesson covers that.

The ten second find

Pick a person and an item. "Go and get the oxygen." Start timing, say nothing else, and write down two things: how long it took, and what was in the way.

Ten seconds is not a rule, it is a target your office chooses so the exercise has a pass and a fail. Pick one, say it out loud, and hold the building to it rather than the person.

Three variations worth rotating through. Run it from the operatory furthest from the equipment, not the nearest. Run it at lunch, when internal doors get locked and half the team is out. And rotate the person, because the finding you want is which item nobody but the coordinator can locate.

The call, read aloud

Do not dial 911. Hand the call sheet from Lesson 2 to whoever is at the desk, have a second person play the dispatcher, and run it as a conversation. The dispatcher asks for the address, the callback number, which entrance, and what floor. The caller answers from the sheet only.

The first time an office does this, something on the sheet is always wrong. Usually it is the address, because the sheet was written from the mailing address rather than the physical one. Sometimes the callback number rolls to the answering service. Sometimes the suite number on the sheet is not the number on the door.

Two extra things to test while you are there. Can you actually dial out from that handset, or does the phone system need a digit first? And does the front desk know which phone the plan says to use?

The path walk

This is the drill nobody runs and the one that finds the expensive problems.

Walk the route from the furthest operatory to the front door twice: once empty handed, once imagining the width and turning radius of a wheeled stretcher. Note every place it would have to stop or reverse. The corner outside sterilization. The chair somebody parks in the hallway. The doorway narrower than it looks. The threshold strip. The elevator, its wait, and whether it needs a fob. The gate, and whether the code changed when the property manager did.

Run it with the greeter and one other person, because the greeter's job depends entirely on the answer. Then write down what you found and decide which items are permanent fixes. A hallway chair is a habit you change today. A doorway is a conversation with the landlord, better had now than during an event.

Running One Without Alarming the Waiting Room

This is the objection that stops offices from drilling during business hours, and it is a reasonable one. Handled properly it is not a problem.

• Say the word "drill" out loud at the start and again at the end. Loudly, clearly, every single time, no exceptions. This one habit does most of the work.
• Prefer the quiet slots. Before opening, during the lunch break, after the last patient, or on an administrative day. You do not need patient hours for any of the three drills above.
• Give the front desk one prepared sentence in case a patient asks. Calm and boring beats clever: we run practice drills for our emergency plan, nothing is happening. Rehearse the sentence, because an improvised answer sounds worse than the drill.
• Never dial 911, never break the seal on the real kit, never consume real single use items, and never take a device out of service for a drill. Use a labeled practice box and expired components you have set aside for the purpose.
• Tell your neighbors if you share a building or a corridor and the drill will be visible from outside. A dental office rehearsing at the front door is a curiosity; an unexplained one is a rumor.
• Put everything back within the hour and note the restoration on the log. A drill that leaves the kit unsealed until Thursday has made the office less ready than it was.
• Do not surprise somebody who has told you they find this distressing. Give them the observer role instead. They are often the best observer you have.

What It Finds, and the One Rule

Here is a realistic list of what these drills turn up in ordinary practices, and notice that not one item is clinical.

• The supply room is locked during the exact hour the drill was run.
• The cabinet latch takes two hands and a knack that only one person has.
• The AED lives in the doctor's private office, which is locked when the doctor is out.
• The plan copy in operatory three is an older version than the one at the desk.
• Two positions are both assigned the runner role and nobody is assigned the front door.
• The phone needs an extra digit to dial out and the newest team member did not know.
• The gate code on the call sheet changed when the plaza changed management.
• The hallway has a chair in it that has been there so long nobody sees it.
• The front desk kept checking patients in because the plan never told them to stop.

Every one of those is cheap to fix and invisible until somebody walks the route with a stopwatch.

Now the rule, and it is the only one in this lesson: a drill with no written findings did not happen. One page is enough. What was tested, what was found, who owns each fix, the date it is due, and a column that gets initialed when somebody has verified the fix actually works.

Two habits make that page matter. First, fix the cheap findings the same day. Move the chair, unlock the door, reprint the plan. The credibility of your next drill is built almost entirely on whether anything visibly changed after this one. Second, re test what failed at the next drill instead of testing something new. A finding is not closed because somebody said they would handle it. It is closed when it has been re run and passed.

Keeping the record

The drill log belongs with the equipment logs from Lesson 3, on the same calendar, reviewed at the same time. Record the date, who ran it, who was present, what was tested, what was found, what changed and who verified it. Keep the completed pages.

Whether your state board or your permit level requires documented rehearsal, and what the record must show, is a question for them and not for any article. Ask, and if the answer is yes, find out what form they expect the record to take before you design your own. Recurring items like this need a home, and our annual compliance calendar is built to hold them alongside everything else that recurs.

Certification Belongs to Somebody Else

There is one part of readiness the office cannot build for itself, and should not try.

Certification in CPR and basic life support comes from an accredited training provider, with an instructor, hands on practice and an assessment. It does not come from a website, from a lunch and learn, from a colleague demonstrating something in the break room, or from this course. Nothing on ChairsideSource certifies anybody in anything, and no amount of drilling doors and phones substitutes for it.

What the manager owns here is entirely administrative, and it is the part that fails:

• The roster. Name, credential, issuing provider, date issued, date it lapses. Kept where the person who books training can see it, not in a folder in the owner's office.
• Renewal before the lapse. Book early enough that a cancelled class does not create a gap. A lapsed card is a scheduling failure that becomes a compliance problem.
• Who needs what. Which team members must hold which credential is set by your state board and your permit level. Not a preference, and not uniform. Ask.
• The budget and the time. Make it a line item and pay for the hours. An office that expects people to certify on their own time and their own money will have lapses and will find out at the worst moment.
• Scheduling coverage. Certification takes people off the floor. Decide whether you close for a morning, send people in shifts or bring a provider on site, and book far enough ahead that the schedule absorbs it.
• Onboarding. A new hire's certification status belongs on the onboarding checklist. Our staff onboarding plan is a reasonable place to put it.

Group booking on site is often cheaper per person and removes the scheduling excuse. One caution: if everyone certifies on the same day, everyone lapses on the same day, which concentrates renewal into a single expensive week every cycle. Decide deliberately whether you want that or would rather stagger it.

The most common failure here is mundane. The roster lives in one person's head or in a drawer, and the first anybody hears about a lapse is when somebody goes looking for a card. A shared spreadsheet with a date column fixes it permanently.

THE CHAIRSIDE TAKE

Stop planning the big drill. It is the reason you have not run one. Attach four minutes to a huddle you already hold, time somebody walking to the oxygen, write down what was in the way, and move it before lunch. Do that a handful of times and you will have found more real problems than any hour long scenario would have produced, and your team will not dread the next one, because nobody was ever the one being tested. Keep the findings on one page and re test what failed. And be clear about the boundary: drilling doors and phones is the office's job, certification is an accredited provider's job, and neither one covers for the other.

Lesson 4 of 5 in Emergency Readiness in the Dental Office

This guide is educational content and does not constitute legal, financial, tax, or clinical advice. Laws and regulations vary by state and change over time. Consult your own dental-specific attorney, CPA, and state dental board before acting.