It seems that quite often owners of dental practices are caught between a rock and a hard place. The job of being a general dental practitioner is surely the hardest one in dentistry, trying to choose which areas to develop in your clinical practice to be proficient at and which areas to delegate to other people either inside or outside your practice. 

Offering a wider range of treatments to patients certainly makes complete sense both from a patient and a business perspective. How do you choose which areas to work on and which to not?

The easiest ways to choose is to choose what you like and what you think you can love, leaving the rest of the areas to people who love those areas and are better qualified. In my own practice, I have never had any interest in Endodontics, or Orthodontics and I am privileged to be able to work beside two specialists in these areas whose advice I can take. My interests are in surgery.

If you wish to develop an interest in implant dentistry in your practice then you should make sure that you are interested and enjoy both surgical and restorative dentistry. If you do not enjoy either then it is probably worthwhile delegating the aspects of that care to someone else.

If you do enjoy them both and are happy to commit to learning a new skill set to develop your practice then a longer-term strategy to improve your skills on a ‘pyramid led’ basis is surely the ideal approach.

Gone are the days it seems where you can learn aspects of implant dentistry in two days to be able to go into practice and carry on. The mastery of basic surgical skills, restorative skills and understanding occlusion takes longer than that. You need assistance and mentoring so as not to fall fell of complications that would upset the patient’s relationship and end up in difficulties. One can look at the possibility of introducing implant dentistry on the basis of a competitive business advantage, but I feel it is better to look at it from the possibility of looking after patients in a more holistic fashion and having an interesting and rewarding career. Nobody that I have ever met in dentistry is good at every aspect of dentistry, it is much more beneficial to pick an area of interest and to focus on that area to become good.