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Sydney is the second most multicultural city in the world. Sydney is home to one of the world’s oldest continuous cultures and is home to residents who identify with over 270 different global heritages. Statistics show that 1 in 4 Australians were born overseas, showing how multicultural our city and country really is and why it’s important to demonstrate cultural competency!
Cultural diversity is an important factor to success in any profession. In dentistry it is paramount to make patients as comfortable as possible to alleviate any anxiety and also educate the patient in an appropriate way to prevent and treat underlying dental issues. For example, in dentistry, the language used may be quite complex for some patients to understand if English is not their first language (it can be confusing even for native english-speaking patients), having staff who are multilingual is beneficial to provide a clear translation.
Our Bondi Beach practice welcomes a broad demographic of patients on a daily basis, from backpackers, long-term residents and expats. Our staff at Dentist Mandy come from a range of cities and countries including Hong Kong, Malaysia, China, Czech Republic, England and Bangladesh. The languages spoken at Dentist Mandy include Mandarin, Cantonese, Malay, Czech and Slovakian, Bengali, Dutch & Spanish.
Diversity within a workplace incorporates the respect and values that each member of staff and patient brings into the dental clinic. A diverse environment helps provide everyone to equal opportunities, rights and treatment regardless of ethnicity, skin colour, gender, age, sexual orientation and religion. Diversity does not mean that every patient must have a practitioner just like them. The dentist and dental team need to have awareness of the differing cultures and how to respond to patient sensibilities.
A multicultural and diverse workplace can be advantageous in many ways, aside from the repertoire of languages and backgrounds. The diversity can introduce an array of unique skills, increasing the productivity level of the clinic and the creativity of workers as they start viewing things from a different perspective and offer an array of solutions to solve problems.
Over the last 10 years, we see many overseas-trained dentists immigrating to Australia and they bring different languages, skills and technologies that further enhance our ability to treat patients. There has been a large increase of female practitioners in a once heavily male dominated industry too. Our team at Dentist Mandy is a female run team. Have a read about our female team and women in dentistry!
