On Thursday this week I had an all-day teaching of the Leicester and Northampton DFT scheme (newly qualified dentists in practice, if you're not from the GB dental community).
These guys qualified in dentistry about eight months ago after having much of their course disrupted by pandemics and lockdowns and no patient contact.
For around 25 years now, I've been asking these new dental groups what they would like to earn for a living if I could give them it now index-linked for the rest of their life, understanding that if they ask for too much (like flying too close to the sun) they'll die and get nothing.
I've watched this ebb and flow through the decades and seen the damage that was about to be caused by dentistry in the middle of the noughties when the same VT group came back with an average income requirement of £250,000 a year between 16 dentists.
So, think about the format.
I asked them to anonymously put down the number that they like or would expect to have for the rest of their life starting now, that would be index-linked going forwards with six weeks holiday and study leave and no on-call and a really nice life.
And back in the noughties, people wanted a minimum of a quarter of a million pounds, having just emerged from university and knowing nothing about dentistry.
It was never that much when I started in 1998. It was way, way, way less and then it spiked in the middle of the noughties, heading towards the end of the noughties and we can all see where that cohort is now, can't we?
These guys were so much more realistic yesterday, somebody actually wrote “I don't know what the number is, I just want to be happy” (loved that).
One of the others wanted 200-300k, but that's OK because there's always one ambitious guy around but if you take the top one and the bottom one off, you get a number, which sits at about 105k.
That's an awful lot of money and about the same as a consultant paediatric transplant surgeon but it's a lot less than 250k.
These guys also all want to work part time and can't see themselves working five days clinical for very long.
All the predictions about this generation are correct.
They're less materialistic (generally) and less likely to want to work themselves to death.
It's interesting to think about that, though, because we are going to have a productivity problem of enormous proportion.
Just imagine that everybody who qualified in 2022 decides to work four days a week instead of five.
You have just reduced that year's population of dentistry by 20% and that is happening year on year.
Add into that the fact that guys at the other end are bailing out as quickly as possible (in spite of the fact that the Dentex bubble has burst).
If you extrapolate that forwards and you plan to stay in the profession, every single day that passes makes you a more valuable commodity to the healthcare community.
Blog Post Number - 3413