Dr Phillip Palmer, January 2005 - One of the constant issues that Prime consultants get asked to consult with their client dentists about is regarding part-time staff. It is amazing that in 2005, with all that we require of our staff members, many dentists still feel that they are best served by multiples of casual or part-time (COPT) team members instead of full-time permanent staff.

The reasons dentists give for taking on staff on a casual or part-time basis boils down to:
 

1. It’s terrific for when one staff member is away.” Obviously there can be some benefits from having a team of staff ready to come in when other team-members can’t make it, but the reality of the situation is that usually the COPT relationship ensures that those team members aren’t totally committed to the practice. The COPT team members will be already engaged on the days when you want them available to cover for a sudden emergency in your office. After all, often the attraction for them to be employed as COPT is that they can look after their kids or elderly parent, have some leisure activities, take on other employment, etc.

2. “That way, our team costs can be lowered because staff don’t have to be paid when the dentist isn’t working.”
This sounds good in theory, in some mythical ideal world, team members would be fully occupied whenever the dentist is there, and would disappear when the dentist was away sick, on holidays etc.

However, in reality there are so many jobs that need doing around a practice that require downtime from treating patients that there is often much to catch up on when the dentist isn’t around. Jobs like:

• Archiving files
• Reactivating patients
• Re-stocking
• Going through old stock
• Cleaning out tubs, trays, x-ray developers, autoclaves
• Maintenance of clinical equipment
• Catching up with correspondence
• Computer maintenance, etc

In actual fact when benchmarking staff wages across Prime clients, employment costs are almost always not truly lowered by paying casual rates. Dentists paying an hourly rate rather than a full-time rate often find efficiency being compromised as some staff members can take advantage of the situation by:

• Arriving at work early in the mornings ‘punching-in’ (figuratively speaking) while they have breakfast, etc and ‘punching-out’ and leaving long after normal duties are completed.
• Deciding to do work at times designated as time-and-a-half or double-time.

Again this would cause employment costs to be exaggerated compared to the practice with full-time staff.

3. “It’s easier to calculate everyone’s pay-rates if casual staff are employed, as there’s never any holiday pay or leave entitlements to calculate.”

These days when software pay packages (MYOB or Quick-Pay, or Micropay, etc) are so available and reasonably priced, it actually is even cheaper to use these than calculating casual rates.
In addition, there is often an element of resentment from staff that they are not receiving normal pay entitlements such as holiday pay, sick pay, etc, even though theoretically they are receiving it in their casual rates.

In reality, there are some significant disadvantages when utilising casual or part-time staff as a matter of normal business practice:

• There is a lack of accountability. When you’re trying to get to the bottom of “who put this patient in at this time”, or “where did you put that dental material after you used it last?” or “has anybody rung Mrs Jackson?”- there’s nothing worse than being told: “not me”, or “it must have been Mary” (whoever’s not here right now), or “maybe someone did yesterday, when I wasn’t here.” Trying to give an instruction to a team who may not be around to carry out the implementation of the instruction is an exercise in futility. Clearly accountabilities should be in place so that everything that happens in any area of the practice is the responsibility of one team member, not whoever is working that day.\
• There is a difficulty in having meetings. This can be a huge problem for any practice that is attempting to educate staff, change protocols, organise new marketing, and integrate new materials or methodologies into the practice. Often the same meeting needs to be held multiple times in even small practices just to get information to all concerned team members.
• Training team members is so much more time consuming when there are more team members doing the same job. I don’t think I’ve met any dentist who says that they love it when they have new staff to train. Employing casual or part-time staff means that there needs to be more time spent in this area than if fulltime staff is the norm.

Some practices work exceedingly well with casual or part-time staff. If however you find that your practice identifies with some of the situations outlined, perhaps you should re-consider whether it is best to continue, or change your policy of employment.