Smile Solutions named 2014 Telstra Victorian Business of the Year

Smile Solutions was named the 2014 Telstra Victorian Business of the Year. The award was accepted by founder and managing director Dr Kia Pajouhesh.

What follows is drawn from his acceptance speech. Contemporary coverage is collected under our media — see the 2014 Telstra Business Awards, the speech itself and an interview recorded on the night.

What the award is. The Telstra Business Awards were a national programme recognising Australian businesses on business criteria — growth, innovation, leadership, customer experience. It is a business award, not a clinical one. It was not issued by a health regulator, it did not assess treatment quality, and it says nothing about the outcome of any individual course of dental treatment. That is stated here because the National Law requires advertising of health services not to imply otherwise, and because it happens to be true.

Starting from nothing

The business started from scratch.

He paid $2,800 for his first dental chair. In the early days the dental nurse had to leave at lunchtime, even with patients booked through to the end of the afternoon — because the practice could not afford to pay her past a certain point.

It was, in his words, tough.

The three-year search

The part of the speech that drew the room was about trusting an instinct for longer than seemed reasonable.

For three years he searched up and down Collins Street. As a dentist, he said, you want to be a Collins Street dentist. Nothing came up. The buildings he saw struck him as lifeless.

Then, during a massage — with the same therapist he had seen for 23 years — he had what he described as an absolute vision: his practice was going to be in a church.

The morning that followed

The next morning he parked outside Currajong House at 175 Collins Street and went looking for it.

He walked up to Scots’ Church on the corner of Russell and Collins, looked at the small library beneath it, and concluded he could not fit a dental practice in there. He needed something bigger.

He walked around the block to St Paul’s Cathedral, went inside, and wondered whether there might be a corner available — two or three chairs, quality rather than quantity. He left feeling despondent, and, as he told the audience with some self-deprecation, faintly ridiculous.

Then he looked up

Walking down Swanston Street towards Collins, he looked up and saw the Manchester Unity Building — the art deco tower on the corner of Collins and Swanston.

“That is my church.”

What happened next

He called the agents. There was space available for lease on level one. He told them he would have bought that space within a week.

One week later he had purchased level one.

Ten years on, at the time of the award, the practice occupied five floors of the building, with 27 dental chairs in operation. The location page describes the premises as they are now.

“It’s as simple and complicated as that.”

The building he found

Worth a paragraph, because the choice turned out to be structural rather than decorative.

The Manchester Unity Building was designed by architect Marcus Barlow and completed in 1932, commissioned by the Manchester Unity Independent Order of Oddfellows. Its stepped Gothic form was influenced by the Chicago Tribune Tower, and it is clad in cream and green faience — glazed architectural terracotta. It was briefly Melbourne’s tallest building, carried one of the city’s first escalators, and is on the Victorian Heritage Register.

It is also, unusually for a heritage tower, a vertical building with large contiguous floor plates — which is the feature that made the rest possible.

Have a Deco at a Classic and Inside the Manchester Unity Building cover the building in more detail, as do Art deco oasis in the heart of Melbourne and Melbourne Open House.

Why the story is on this site

The building is not incidental to how the practice works. A single site with multiple floors is what allows general dentists, hygienists and registered specialists to work in one place — so a referral means going up a floor rather than across the city and onto another waiting list.

That model was a consequence of the premises, and the premises were the result of a three-year search that most people would have abandoned.

The practical consequences for a patient are specific, and they are the reason the story is not just a founder’s anecdote:

Records and radiographs move with you between clinicians instead of being posted or re-taken
Clinicians can discuss a case in person, rather than by referral letter weeks apart
The laboratory and the imaging centre are in the building, so a crown can be adjusted during the appointment and a scan read the same day — see technology
Complex plans spanning several disciplines can be sequenced in one conversation — described step by step in complex dental cases: what happens when multiple specialists collaborate

It matters most for cases that genuinely span disciplines. For a check-up and clean it is irrelevant, and a good local practice is the sensible choice. Complex Dentistry.

What an award does and does not tell you

If you have arrived here while choosing a dentist, the useful checks are these, and all are free:

The AHPRA public register at ahpra.gov.au — it shows each practitioner’s registration, whether they hold specialist registration and in which field, and any conditions. It is more authoritative than anything asserted on any practice website, including this one. See dentists and registered specialists for the names to look up, and finding a dentist online in Australia for the rest of the method.
Ask who specifically will do the work, then look that person up by name — our team.
Ask for the plan and quote in writing, itemised — understanding your treatment and the price guide.
Get a second opinion before anything significant or irreversible. Second Opinions & Corrective Dentistry.

Common questions

What does the AHPRA register actually show me — and what does it not?

It is a registration record, and understanding its limits is as useful as using it.

The Dental Board of Australia describes it this way: Ahpra "publishes an online register of all dental practitioners that provides the profession and the public with up-to-date information about a dental practitioner's registration status", and the register "also includes details of the specialty or specialties for dentists who hold specialist registration". It also records conditions where the Board has imposed them on someone's registration.

So it answers, definitively and for free: is this person registered to practise dentistry in Australia right now; is their registration general or specialist; if specialist, in which field; and is anything restricting how they may practise.

What it does not do is rank anyone. It carries no measure of treatment quality, no outcome data, no fees, no waiting times, and no indication of how much of a particular procedure someone does in a year. A practitioner with unrestricted general registration and thirty years of doing one thing well looks identical on the register to one who qualified last month. The register tells you whether the floor has been met. Everything above the floor you have to ask about directly.

The page mentions "registered specialists". What does that actually mean in Australia?

It is a defined legal status, not a description of interest or experience.

The Dental Board states that "there are 13 dental specialties in Australia which are approved by the Australian Health Workforce Ministerial Council". They are dento-maxillofacial radiology, endodontics, forensic odontology, oral and maxillofacial surgery, oral medicine, oral and maxillofacial pathology, oral surgery, orthodontics, paediatric dentistry, periodontics, prosthodontics, public health dentistry (community dentistry), and special needs dentistry.

To hold specialist registration in one of them, a dentist must hold a qualification in that specialty, meet every requirement for general registration as a dentist, and — the requirement most people do not know about — have "completed a minimum of two years general dental practice" beforehand, which may be achieved outside Australia subject to the Board's assessment.

Two consequences follow. First, specialist registration is verifiable rather than claimed: it appears on the register, in a named field. Second, if the treatment you are considering falls in one of those thirteen areas, you can find out in a minute whether the person proposing it holds registration in that field — and if they do not, that is not automatically wrong, but it is worth a conversation about who does what.

How do I tell a genuine registration from a descriptive job title on a dental website?

By checking the register rather than the wording — because the wording is where the ambiguity lives, and the regulator says so explicitly.

Ahpra's advertising guidelines address exactly this. They note that a descriptive term attached to a title "might provide useful information to the public about the subset of the population, area of practice or specific setting the practitioner works in", but warn that "advertisers must take care that the title does not over-represent the practitioner's skills, experience or qualifications, or imply specialist registration or endorsement".

The worked example they give is from medicine and translates directly. "Dr Taylor, GP Oncologist" is flagged as a potential breach, because it implies registration in a recognised specialty the practitioner does not hold. The compliant version is "Dr Taylor, GP who works extensively with patients undergoing cancer treatment." Read dental websites with that example in mind: a phrase like "dentist with a special interest in X" is describing what someone does; a recognised specialist title is describing what they are registered as. They are not the same claim, and only one of them appears on the register.

The guidelines are equally clear that legitimate qualifications are advertisable. If a practitioner "holds further or postgraduate qualifications, or has specific experience, or has completed specific courses it is acceptable to advertise that in an accurate and factual manner", including where the qualification was issued. What is not acceptable is letters after a name that imply "more qualifications, skill or experience than is the case". If you cannot tell what a post-nominal means, ask — the answer should be a specific award from a named body in a named year.

What are dental practices not allowed to put on a website?

Knowing the rules makes the exceptions easy to spot, and they are short.

Under the Dental Board's guidelines, advertising of a regulated health service must not be false, misleading or deceptive, or likely to mislead or deceive; must not "offer a gift, discount or other incentive, unless you state the terms and conditions"; must not "use purported or real testimonials about the service or business"; must not "create an unreasonable expectation of beneficial treatment"; and must not "directly or indirectly encourage indiscriminate or unnecessary use of regulated health services".

The National Law separately prohibits advertising that suggests a practitioner holds specialist registration, qualifications or an endorsement when they do not, whether by using a title or by any other means.

Four practical things to look for, then, on any dental website including this one: an offer with no terms attached anywhere; patient accounts of their own treatment used as marketing; language promising a particular result; and titles that sound like registrations but are not. None of those is a guarantee of bad dentistry — but each is something the regulator has decided the public should not have to sort out for themselves.

Practical details

Smile Solutions, Level 1, 220 Collins Street, Manchester Unity Building, Melbourne VIC 3000. Phone 13 13 96, or theteam@smilesolutions.com.au; full details on the contact page. Monday–Friday 8.00am–6.00pm, Saturday 8.30am–1.30pm, Sunday by appointment.

Specialist registration can be verified free on the AHPRA public register at ahpra.gov.au, or by calling 1300 419 495.

Published 10 July 2014. Figures quoted are as at the date of the award and are historical rather than current. This page summarises an acceptance speech and is not clinical information. A business award is not a clinical endorsement, is not issued by a health regulator, and says nothing about the outcome of any individual course of treatment.

Smile Solutions trades under ABN 28 193 514 103.