Do you have sufficient staff?

According to an article I read, if you ring a suburban police station, the phone will most likely be answered by a police officer. In addition, police officers have to type up reports on a DOS-based system that’s so ancient, it won’t talk to any modern systems.

The reason is understaffing. Instead of employing a receptionist at $28 per hour to answer the phones and do the typing the government prefers to use police officers at $52 per hour to do those tasks. Police should be out catching crooks, not doing office work.

What do I see in dental offices? As I travel around I find that a big majority are understaffed just like the police force. The best and highest use of a dentist’s time is to diagnose and treat patients. The only time a dentist generates billable income is when they’re diagnosing and treating patients. If they’re doing anything other than those two things then their productivity is less than ideal.

A few years ago I started to write a list of tasks that I saw dentists do that could’ve been easily delegated. The list got up to 43 items before I stopped. Just to give you a few examples: Writing lab sheets, writing referrals, typing clinical notes, setting up rubber dam, and even something as simple as putting the bib and safety glasses on the patient.

I’d like to challenge dentists to look at how you spend your day.

My contention is this: To be optimally efficient each dentist needs 3 support staff — a primary DA, a secondary DA and a float DA. This is 2 more than is usual in most dental offices. With 3 support staff down time is eliminated and a dentist can spend 100% of their time looking after patients and generating billable income.

That increase in productive capacity will more than pays for the additional staff. Are you understaffed?

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