2014 Telstra Business Awards

Media item: coverage of the 2014 Telstra Business Awards

This page records the media item. Third-party coverage is the property of its publisher and is not reproduced here.

What follows is general information on what a business award actually measures — written plainly, because awards are used heavily in health marketing and are widely misread.

What a business award is judged on

Business awards — as distinct from clinical or academic prizes — assess the enterprise, not the treatment. Judging criteria across the major Australian programmes typically cover:

• financial performance and growth
• strategy, planning and governance
• leadership and workplace culture
• customer experience and retention
• innovation, systems and processes
• community contribution

Entry is voluntary and self-nominated. An applicant writes a submission, supplies evidence, and is judged against other applicants in that year and category. Businesses that do not enter cannot win, which is the single most important thing to understand about every award list you will ever read.

What it therefore does tell you

Honestly, some real things:

• The business submitted itself to external scrutiny and its documentation held up.
• It was operating well enough as an organisation to be assessed favourably on management, systems and staff.
• It has been going long enough to have a record — most categories require trading history.

For a patient, the operational side of a practice is not nothing. Recall systems that actually recall you, records that are accurate and retrievable, sterilisation logs that are kept, staff who stay long enough to know you, and fee estimates that are given in writing before treatment are all functions of how a business is run rather than of clinical skill. A well-run practice makes good clinical care easier to deliver consistently.

What it does not tell you

This is the part that matters more, and it is rarely said.

• It is not a clinical assessment. No business award panel examines radiographs, restorations, endodontic outcomes or complication rates. None is competent to.
• It is not a registration or accreditation. Registration comes from the Dental Board of Australia; practice accreditation is assessed against the National Safety and Quality Health Service Standards. An award is neither.
• It says nothing about the practitioner you will see. A practice is a group of individuals. Your treatment is provided by one of them.
• It is a snapshot of one year, judged against that year's field, and staff, ownership and standards can all change afterwards.
• It is not evidence that treatment is well-priced, appropriate, or conservative.

Under section 133 of the National Law, advertising a health service must not create an unreasonable expectation of beneficial treatment, and must not be misleading by omission. An award used to imply better clinical outcomes would do exactly that — which is why this page states plainly what the award was for.

What actually predicts good dental care

If you are choosing a practice, these are worth more than any award:

• Registration. Search the practitioner free at ahpra.gov.au. Check the registration type, any specialty, and any conditions.
• Whether a specialty claim is real. Australia recognises thirteen dental specialties. ‘Cosmetic dentist', ‘implantologist' and ‘sleep dentist' are not among them.
• Written quotes with ASDS item numbers, given before treatment, so you can check a rebate or compare.
• A clear answer to ‘what happens if I do nothing?' and a conservative option offered alongside the proposed one.
• Willingness to refer complex cases to a registered specialist.
• Emergency arrangements — what happens if something goes wrong on a Sunday.
• Continuity. Seeing the same practitioner matters more for long-term dental care than most people expect, because small changes over years are what a familiar clinician notices.
• How complaints are handled. Ask. A practice that answers the question comfortably is telling you something.

How to read awards on any health website

A short, transferable checklist:

1. Who ran the award, and were entries self-nominated?
2. What was the category, and how large was the field?
3. What year? An award from a decade ago describes a business that may no longer exist in the same form.
4. Was it judged on business operations or on clinical work? Almost always the former.
5. Is it a genuine independent programme, or a paid listing, a directory badge, or a ‘best of' page funded by the businesses appearing on it? Some are simply advertising.

None of this is a reason to disregard awards entirely — it is a reason to read them as what they are. The 2014 Telstra Business Awards were a national business programme, and this page records participation in it without inviting any inference about clinical outcomes.

Common questions

Why are there hundreds of reviews of dental practices online, but almost never a patient story on a practice's own website?

Because the two sit on different sides of a line in the National Law, and the line is about control, not about where the words came from.

Ahpra's advertising guidelines define a testimonial as ‘recommendations or positive statements about the clinical aspects of a regulated health service used in advertising', with ‘patient stories, patient experiences or success stories' as the examples. Using one to advertise a regulated health service is prohibited. The guidelines then set out who carries the obligation: an advertiser has control ‘if they publish or authorise content or direct someone to publish or draft content', or if ‘there is a mechanism for the advertiser to modify or remove content published by an unrelated publisher'. Where a review appears on a site the practice does not control, the guidelines are explicit that advertisers ‘do not have to remove or try to remove' it.

So a review on an independent platform is the reviewer's, and the practice is not required to police it. The same words copied onto the practice's own website become the practice's advertising, and then they are prohibited. That asymmetry — not squeamishness, and not an absence of happy patients — is why practice websites in Australia look the way they do.

One nuance that surprises people: the guidelines say ‘not all reviews or positive comments made about a regulated health service are considered testimonials', and give the example that ‘comments about customer service or communication style that do not include a reference to clinical aspects are not considered testimonials'. Praise for the receptionist is allowed. Praise for the root canal is not.

Are online reviews and star ratings any use at all when choosing a dentist?

For some things, yes; for the thing you most want to know, no — and the split follows the same clinical-versus-service line.

Reviews are a reasonable signal on what patients can actually observe: whether the practice runs to time, whether fees were explained before treatment, how the phone is answered, whether someone followed up. Those are the operational qualities described above, and they are real.

They are a poor signal on clinical quality, for the reasons Ahpra gives when explaining why testimonials are prohibited in advertising: they ‘are often personal opinions and may have no objective basis for recommending a registered health practitioner or health service'; ‘the outcomes experienced by one patient do not necessarily reflect the outcome, or likely outcome available to all patients'; they are ‘not usually a balanced source of information (they often include a selection of positive comments about experiences and do not tell the whole story)'; and ‘the public may not have expert knowledge to assess if the information is accurate'.

That last one is the decisive one in dentistry. A crown that looks excellent and feels comfortable on the day it is cemented can still have an open margin that will cause decay in three years, and no patient can tell the difference. A five-star review written a fortnight after treatment cannot report an outcome that has not happened yet.

How do I tell a genuine award from a paid listing or a directory badge?

Four checks, in order of how quickly they settle it.

Follow the badge. A real programme has a public page naming the year, the category, the judging criteria and usually the other finalists. A paid badge tends to link to a directory's own sign-up page, or nowhere at all.

Look for the entry route. Ask, or read, how a business gets considered. If the answer is a fee, a subscription or a listing package, it is advertising with a graphic on it. Note that self-nomination alone is not disqualifying — most legitimate business awards, including the one this page records, are entered voluntarily. The question is whether money changes hands for the outcome.

Check who judged it, and against what. ‘Voted by readers', ‘top 3 in your area' and ‘best of' pages are popularity or proximity measures, not assessments.

Check the year and the scope. An award names a business in a category in a year. It does not name the practitioner who will treat you, and it does not carry forward.

Whatever the badge turns out to be, it is not a substitute for the one check that costs nothing: the practitioner's entry on the public register at ahpra.gov.au, including the division they are registered in and any conditions recorded against them.

What can I do if I think a dental advertisement is misleading?

You can report it, and the route is designed for members of the public rather than for competitors. Ahpra operates an advertising complaints process and publishes guidance on how to make a complaint about advertising and on how those complaints are managed, through its advertising hub at ahpra.gov.au.

What is worth reporting is anything that looks like the categories the law names: a testimonial about clinical care used in advertising; a claim that creates an unreasonable expectation of beneficial treatment; something misleading, including by leaving out a material fact; an offer whose terms are not stated; or the use of a protected title by someone not entitled to it. Section 133 of the National Law carries financial penalties for advertising offences, and the advertising guidelines are established under the National Law, so a court or tribunal may consider them when hearing a section 133 offence.

Keep a copy — a screenshot with the date and the web address — because advertising is edited quietly and often. If your concern is about the care you received rather than the advertising of it, that is a different pathway: raise it with the practice first, and then with Ahpra or your state health complaints body.

Related reading

• Our Awards and the rest of Our Media
• Smile Solutions lands a Telstra Business Award
• Dentist wins Telstra Business Award
• Interview with Dr Kia Pajouhesh at the 2014 Telstra Business Awards
• Smile Solutions named Telstra Victorian Business of the Year
• Dr Kia Pajouhesh accepts the 2014 Telstra Victorian Business of the Year Award
• The Smile Solutions team celebrates our Telstra Business Award win
• What makes Smile Solutions an innovative business?
• What makes a truly great dentist?
• Finding a dentist online in Australia
• 5 questions you've always wanted to ask your dentist
• Dr Kia Pajouhesh

Practical details

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

Every practitioner's registration and any specialist entry can be verified free on the AHPRA public register at ahpra.gov.au.

This page records a media item. Third-party content is not reproduced. A business award is not a clinical endorsement and no inference about treatment outcomes should be drawn from it. The material above is general information only.

Smile Solutions trades under ABN 28 193 514 103.