This week I had an amazing meeting with someone who holds a very senior position in dentistry and looks after thousands of dentists.
I'm not able to give the game away as to who that might have been because I don’t have permission but they’re interested in teaming up with us to provide education for some of those dentists and to try to improve things for everybody all round, a classic ‘Chinese contract’ as Charles Handy would have described it in his autobiography.
The person the guys at the clinic were meeting with has been around the block many times in dentistry and made the observation that “it’s almost impossible to fail at dentistry”.
What this individual was saying was that you can know nothing about business but work in an NHS dental practice and the patients still continue to come and you can have a business (however soulless) and make a damn good living without actually being very good at it.
There is of course an alternative to that which is to try to be very good at it and try to get soul and joy and love out of it and it pays your money and takes your choice.
The problem is though that the insurance against fear is being removed on a daily basis now.
First of all we find that NHS funding is going to change dramatically and out of sight (particularly in orthodontics). Then we find that team members don’t want to stay in dentistry because it turns out that it’s a bit sh*t to be a team member in many dental practices and then you start to find out that your income is going down and your staff are walking out the door.
Then you realise that the skills that you had which kept you going in the model that you had before will not keep you going in the model that is to come and all of a sudden dental practices will be in danger of failing.
Yesterday, I saw a patient who was begging for help (literally). They had been looked after by a private dentist in our locality for the past 20 years, a husband and wife concern which provided excellent quality dentistry and in fact, my wife was a patient there before I left the hospital service.
Last week she received an email to say the dentist and his wife were retiring and the practice had been sold to two anonymous people that they’d never met and the dentist would leave next Tuesday.
OMG.
Dentists are walking out the door because their businesses are failing and they’re taking what they can get.
The tumultuous change in the world, and obviously in our profession has not finished yet. Perhaps it has not even fully started yet.
Are you prepared for what is to come because the spectre of failure of your business is real unless you start to pay attention.
Blog Post Number - 2936
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