Are you understaffed?
Understaffing is extremely common and has a huge negative impact on productivity.
According to a report I read recently, 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 an DOS-based system that is so ancient that it won’t talk to any modern systems. This means that sometimes they have to type reports three times into different systems.
Of course, we would all agree that answering telephone calls is not the best and highest use of a well-trained police officer. Nor is typing up reports.
You could easily employ someone to do that who would cost less and free up the police officer to be out catching crooks.
But, what about dentistry?
As I travel around visiting practices I see that most are understaffed and under-equipped just like the police are.
Think of it this way.
The best and highest use of a dentist’s time is to diagnose and treat patients. If they are doing anything else then their productivity is less than optimum.
A few years ago I started to write a list of tasks that I saw dentists do that could be easily delegated.
The list got up to 54 items before I stopped.
I’d like to challenge dentists to look at how you spend your day. Any time you are doing tasks that can be delegated is time that is not spent diagnosing and treating patients.
My contention
To be optimally efficient a single dentist needs 3 support staff. This is 2 more than is usual in most dental offices.
With 3 support staff down time is pretty much eliminated. The dentist can spend 100% of their time looking after patients and generating billable income.
That increase in productive capacity more than pays for the additional staff cost. One extra productive hour per day should easily cover the cost of the additional staff.
