As we all know; the dental visit is not a pleasant experience for children and even to the majority of adults.

The dental visit can create the unavoidable fear and anxiety, due to needles, the drill and so many other things.

Although some people experience unbearable pain due to toothache, they still can’t overcome their fear of visiting the dentist – to eliminate the agonising pain, and instead they live on pain killers in order to avoid the dentist.

Other patients demand to be sedated by the ‘happy gas’ in order to get into the dental chair, while others get a script of sedatives from their GP to enable them to go to the dentist.

Interestingly some patients cancel their dental appointment at the last minute simply because they couldn’t overcome their fear.

From my experience; I found that 99% of these patients had a very bad experience when they were children which made me to think that we have to eliminate this unnecessary fear from upcoming generations.

To put this into action, we decided to ensure that The Good Shepherd Medical and Dental Centre is a children-friendly clinic. We have lots of toys, colouring pens and pencils, colouring books, oral health bags – containing a nice looking tooth brush, tooth paste, oral health flyer, a toy and colouring materials.

Most of the time we make the first visit just a nice exciting one with the toys and gifts without carrying out any dental treatment unless the child is coming for an emergency treatment.

We bulk bill all the eligible children 2-17 years of age under the Medicare scheme.

We also have the happy gas and twilight sedation for a pain-free comfortable experience.