A long time ago I read a Seth Godin blog where he tried to predict the future.
More recently I wrote a blog about how accurate his predication of the future were and thought it would be cool every so often to try to do it myself.
And so, in the midst of my time off and with my nose off the grindstone, here’s what things seem to look like from my and our perspective in our little bubble.
I’m talking about dentistry and my profession and career. It might be a stretch to say I might be qualified to look into the future in dentistry but I’m certainly not qualified to look into anywhere else.
- NHS provision of dentistry as we know it is dying and dying very quickly.
The reasons for this are many and diverse because things were pretty bad before the pandemic but now the pandemic has escalated the crisis to a level which is utterly unmanageable.
The move to 85% minimum contract value for practices which feel ill-equipped, with poor infrastructure and exhausted and broken teams is just an impossible circle to square.
The simplest way out seems to be to go into the private sector and therefore Denplan and Practice Plan are rubbing their hands together as people jump to convert.
Sadly though, it was someone very wise that told me a long time ago “you never want to be the last practice to go private in your town”.
If we accept that this is at least in part a reality, it means that the ability to provide NHS dentistry will only be available in places where it’s needed most (I so hope that this becomes true) and this in turn will lead onto many of the other situations that I’ve listed below.
2) NHS dentistry will need a brand-new funding model (again), there is no chance you will be able to keep a team together in NHS dentistry for the wages you’re paying your staff (apart from dentists), reception team, nursing team, administrative team will all want and demand greater salaries for the jobs that they do or they will find jobs somewhere else.
Remember that there are already 1.5million job vacancies in the UK and it will seem a lot better to work for more money at a McDonalds drive through than it will to be shouted at by a 'boss' in an NHS dental practice.
3) Experience in dentistry will drop dramatically because in the last few weeks I’ve been told of 4 senior colleagues who have decided to retire at short notice.
One colleague gave his patients 1 weeks notice before he left, this will be replicated throughout the country as people in their 50’s (and some even younger) decide that they’ve had enough of compliance and complaints and stealing with teams and dealing with finance and decide to bail out and stop work all together or to find a way of making a living which feels less onerous than the one in which they’re in.
This will leave a gaping skills gap in dentistry as when a 55 year-old retires it’s impossible for a 25 year old dentist to fill that space as there is a 30 year gulf of experience and patient management left in the middle. This will be a huge opportunity but one that can only be filled by education.
4) The fight for team members will become vicious and expensive as the good team colleagues in dentistry gravitate towards the better, higher-paid, more stimulating and career based opportunities that exist.
This will take a few years as the older people leave, the younger people will have to be much more stimulated in order to stay or else they will move sectors into places that seem better.
The growth of independent and private dentistry will be massive as the middle class realise that they cannot get their dentistry from NHS practices anymore (and realise that they cannot get their children’s braces there either). They will then become more and more consumer based, seeking out teams and service and environments where they believe their money is well spent and value is received. The ability to understand the value proposition in dentistry will become one of the most important things for people who wish to be successful moving forwards.
The quality of the dentistry will be a given, it’s everything that goes around it which will be more important.
5) The myth that it is hard to fail in the business of dentistry will disappear and practices will fail and shut.
As it becomes harder and harder to control costs in dentistry and harder again to drive revenues, unless you have an infrastructure which allows you to do that, more and more practices will begin to enter into areas of financial difficulty that they’ve never seen before.
Practice who do not understand operating surgery costs or staff costs and benefits or strategic finance, will struggle more and more to keep a handle on what’s going on.
The days of taking the money out of the till at the end of the month in order to pay for the lifestyle are well and truly over.
6) The skilled associate will become more and more valuable as the principles retire and the skills gap emerges.
Associates may have to choose much more carefully though, as to whether they wish to go into business.
To become a skilled and valuable associate takes time and investment and effort which would otherwise be spent building a business but may, in the coming years, look impossible to do both at the same time.
Dentistry in the UK will move more into the independent sector, NHS dentistry will mean more to geographical locations of need.
The UK middle class will get less and less dentistry funded in anyway and will be expected to fund it themselves (they can afford Sky TV and streaming).
The introduction of backroom technologies will become absolutely fundamental in order to exist in dentistry.
CRM, inbound marketing, cloud based project planning and accountancy and storage systems will all become essential to allow efficiencies in business to make them viable to survive.
Maybe I’ll look back in 2 years at this post and see if any of it was true.
The sad thing is though, all of it looks true at the moment.
Blog Post Number - 2965
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