A great thread on Facebook if you didn't see it was when Chris Barrow recently posted the Genesis advert offering £35,000 per year plus a £3,000 signing on fee plus paid CPD and other benefits for young dentists.
It prompted a great deal of debate as to the value of dentistry and the value of young and developing clinicians.
Some people who posted on that were strong in their view that £35,000 a year for a young dentist was way too little for the training they have had and the time they have spent developing but it wasn't specifically clear what a 'young dentist' was actually defined as.
The problem though is that dentistry has changed out of sight and beyond any recognition from where we previously were.
When I first qualified in 1994 it was the first year of compulsory VDP. The year before some new graduates had gone into gone into VT and some had gone straight into practice as associates as people had always done. It was 20 - 30 patients on day 1 and away you go, hitting £60,000 a year as quickly as possible.
The really clever guys at that stage would take a little bit of time to try to make themselves better dentists but the majority of people hit the treadmill hard and away they went to extremely high levels of earning for people in their 20's until they peaked off in their early 30's and began to burn out.
The opportunity to do that in dentistry is vanishing. The independent practice is vanishing. The value of basic dental procedures is diminishing beyond all recognition. You are now in competition with therapists for the provision of fillings. You're now in competition with CDTs for the provision of dentures. You're not even in competition with hygienists for the provision of hygiene because generally they do it better and understand it more.
Most of my nurses take x-rays, CBCT scans, CEREC scans, photographs and impressions. Both of the hygienists / therapists at my practice do a better examination of a patient than most of the dentists.
In any system, if you want to be valued, you have to provide value.
In the 1994 system you provided value due to the scarcity of dentists.
In the 2016 system that no longer applies.
You need an opportunity to be able to prove yourself to be a ' linchpin' and to take that opportunity and be indispensable to the people who employ you. That will start at lower level of income and will be based around your ability to gain experience and education on the way to becoming a better clinician.
The guys who will make the money in dentistry going forward into the next 10 - 20 years will be the guys at the top 10% of the skills. The only way to get to the top 10% is to 'up skill'. A basic dental degree which means that you're barely able to do a surgical extraction, have made very few dentures and have had no exposure to digital dentistry, implant dentistry or complex restorative dentistry means that you have to find those skills in the first few years of practice and you will not be paid highly for doing so.
The rewards at the other end could be great for those who are prepared to invest but the days are gone of hitting the ground running immediately out of dental school to big five figure salaries.
Blog Post Number: 1006
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