Last week, I spoke to you about the importance of using sign bases in your doctor’s office to profligate good, helpful information to your patients in the form of posters and signs. And the bases remain crucial – they allow the signs and posters to stand up and be seen by any of your patients, and they give you more freedom to place posters as you see fit (no more plastering the walls with poster after poster) around the room. The thing is, simply getting a sign base isn’t quite enough. You’re also gonna need acrylic sign holders to finish the job.

Acrylic sign holders are sturdy protective sheathes that maintain the rigidity of a good poster while protecting its corners and lending an eye-catching, attractive sheen. They give your operation the air of credibility – not that you’re lacking in that area, but if your office is full of naked posters with frayed edges and dull matte finishes, you will appear less than totally professional. And in an industry where people are staking their health on your professionalism, allaying any fears they might have is important.

Don’t stick your posters and signs up on the walls with old thumb tacks. Don’t prop your signs and posters up by leaning them against books or walls. That’s just – pardon the pun – tacky. Instead, use acrylic sign holders for your posters on the wall, and use acrylic sign holders with sign bases for your tabletop signs.

Doing so won’t just keep your patients informed, happy, and patient; using acrylic sign holders to highlight your informational material will maintain the professional appearance your patients have come to expect and deserve.

We’ve been talking for awhile now about the importance of getting informational material out into the examination and waiting rooms of your offices. I think I’ve done a pretty thorough job of urging you doctors to take an active role in making sure your patients are well informed, engaged, and never bored. And, for the most part, I bet you doctors reading this blog will most likely take my advice to heart and start focusing on the little details that make a doctor’s visit a good one, or a bad one.

First, put up informational signs in the waiting room. Waiting room visits are taking longer and longer nowadays, and people will eventually get sick of all the old outdated magazines for which doctors’ offices are famous. If you fill the customer’s periphery with great medial informational posters and signs, you’ll have an engaged, informed customer clientele. Put up some cool pictures of the human body or something, too – the kids love that stuff.

Use much the same method in the examination rooms, too. Imagine this: you’ve been sitting in a noisy waiting room with screaming children for half an hour, only to be ushered into a plain examination room with the assurance that “the doctor will be right with you.” But be honest, docs – you’re never “right with us.” Have a heart and apply the waiting room poster concepts to the exam room.

Whichever you choose, be sure to use acrylic sign holders to protect your posters and give them a professional appearance. You can opt for wall-mounted holders – most do – but another option is to use sign bases. The sign base simply allows a poster or sign to stand up at a slight angle (perfect for viewing) on a table or desk. You don’t want the walls to be absolutely choked by covers, so use sign bases to give your poster arrangements some three-dimensionality.

One more piece of advice for all you doctors out there looking to spruce up your waiting room environment and make it more inviting and welcoming to patients: put up posters! People aren’t going to be satisfied with your old, outdated magazines for very long. They can only read about Brangelina and Bennifer news for so long. Patients are people, too, and they have a breaking point! But don’t be lulled into the ugly habit that most offices – not even just doctors – have when displaying posters: those cheap, totally inauthentic posters with pseudo-inspirational terms like “Integrity” or “Persistence” accompanied by some random, cookie-cutter nature scene. People don’t like those and they’ve become a huge parody of themselves, so lose the sunset shots. A better option would be to put up informational medical posters. That way, the patients will have something substantive to look at while they wait and wait for their names to be called.

I would suggest using a poster detailing all the segments of the human anatomy; that one’s good with the kids and it actually teaches them something useful. If you’re, say, an orthopedist dealing with knees, put up a poster with the interior view of the knee, including tendons, joints, bones, ligaments, with an explanation describing each part. Or this could even work for you dentists. Get a nice poster with comprehensive cross-sections of the teeth from all angles, including what a cavity or decay might look like, and put it up. You could even take it a step further and include some brochures with even more information to clarify just what the patients are looking at on the poster.

Whatever you decide, it’s a good idea to put your posters up in poster holders. That way, you can protect your possessions while presenting them in a professional, distinguished manner. Just slapping some bare posters up on the wall makes your waiting room look like a ten year-old girl’s bedroom; you want to inspire confidence in your patients, not ridicule. Your best bet is to use the style A acrylic sign holder. It’s angled and fits perfectly on a desk or table, so you can display your poster to align with the patients’ eyes. They won’t even have a chance to get bored and annoyed – your style a sign holder will leap out at them! And even better, use a style A with brochure pockets to hold your information brochures and expand on the info presented in the poster.