There are currently 8,500 independent dental practices in the UK with an average of something like 2.5 dentists per practice.
Some of those dentists per practice are doubled up because many work in two different practices these days but it still means that a good percentage (perhaps 50%) of general dental practitioners still work in the independent practice sector as opposed to a corporate or hospital.
The people who are buying practices and the people who are facilitating that (the agents) would like you to believe that within 5 years that number will drop to anything below 1,000 practices.
I think that is entirely wrong and I hope to write a blog 5 years from now to show that it is.
Feelings come and feelings go and at the moment we exist in a situation where many young dentists do not embrace the prospect of practice ownership
Perhaps you should consider why that is?
At the current time if you were a young dentist coming out of dental school and looking to own a practice, how on earth would you manage to achieve that?
Unless you had significant money within your family or a benefactor, the prospect of putting enough money together to even raise a squat is tough.
And so, you would enter into a world of associateship in a corporate or even an independent dental practice knowing that the likelihood is (if it was a good practice) it would be sold or if it was a corporate it had already been sold or could be sold again up the chain.
But as generations pass attitudes change and so do circumstances.
10 years from now almost everybody who’s my age will be out of the profession altogether with their attitudes and their bias’s and their preconceived ideas gone with them.
The people who are 10 or 15 years down the line from me at the moment will be the people who are ‘senior’, and the new people will look to them to see if they like what they see or if they’d like to change it.
I believe the future for independent dental practices is extremely bright because I actually believe that nobody can offer what independent dental practices offer.
I almost never eat in restaurants that are part of a chain (if I can possibly help it). I almost never drink in pubs but if I do, I don’t drink in pubs that are part of a chain.
I seek out smaller businesses, family-owned businesses with a story where I can get to see the person whose name is above the door.
I push back against convenience for substance.
I am not the only person who does that and there is a huge and growing part of society who would rather spend a little bit more on something with a little bit of soul that we can believe in.
Independent dentistry took a battering whilst everybody wanted to sell (and remember if you sell you are a sell-out) so, just before independent dentistry died, it reinvented itself again from the ashes and will go from strength to strength.
Blog Post Number - 3161
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