Dr Phillip Palmer, February 2016
Historically, a normal working week for a dentist has been approximately 32-40 hours, 9am-5pm, Monday to Friday.
As dentists, we didn’t think about opening more extended hours, because we have been fixed in the thinking that our availability should be the same as other professionals, like lawyers, accountants, medical general practitioners or specialists, etc.
Until recently, there was no real need to extend our hours - our appointment book was pretty full with the hours that we offered our patients–and no one expected more from us.
Today’s marketplace is more competitive and patients are harder to come by. Practices wanting to attract and maintain a patient base need to find new ways of standing out from the competition. Between 9 and 5, Monday to Friday, every dental practice in town is competing for work.
Outside of these hours, the competition plummets. Most dentists go home...strangely enough, this is exactly when many patients are most able to attend.
Many patients simply don’t have the flexibility in their jobs to step out between 9am-5pm to go to a dentist appointment for a check-up. Depending upon the demographics of the area, many practices have a patient base that will respond well to appointments being offered during extended hours. In the city, early (from 7am) and late (till 8pm) appointments are often filled by professionals before or after work, whereas weekend appointments are more popular in the suburbs.
So what are the arguments against being open extended hours?
1: “We tried it, it didn’t work”
Dentists often say that they tried opening extended hours, but quickly gave up as their patients didn’t respond to it.
When probed further, it often becomes obvious why it wasn’t working. Deciding to increase opening hours can’t be an ad-hoc experiment, where you open up the books for one Saturday a month or every second Thursday evening for a few months. It requires a longer-term, every week, scheduled commitment of at least six months to a year for a number of reasons:
1. Working one Saturday or one late evening a month as an experiment will not be embraced by the staff. They will resent not being at the park, beach, home with their families, and that will be reflected in their attitude in practice during the extended hours, and how it gets offered to prospective patients.
2. Opening up extended hours as a short term experiment often involves extending everyone’s hours for a while, to see how the patient base responds before committing to extra staff. This can lead to staff resentment. It’s very difficult to just extend everyone’s work hours and expect service levels not to be compromised. You need to allow staff some time off during the week in lieu of working evenings or weekends.
3. Letting the staff know that it is only ‘an experiment’ could incentivise some team members to sabotage the extended hours at the front desk when taking appointments, or with reminders and confirmations.
4. You have to commit to advertising and communicating your new hours to the patient base and potential patient base, and give the message time to reach people. Just opening up your book and waiting for people to show up is unlikely to get you very far.
2: “The staff don’t want it”
Practice owners often say that they would do it, but they are afraid they would have a mutiny on their hands…the staff would hate it. If offered a choice between a 9-5 job, working Monday to Friday, or the same job with extended hours, many (or most) people would choose the regular hours job. However:
As a business owner, if you are offered close to 20% more take-home (remember, fixed expenses are paid for) for being open on Saturdays, and you aren’t trying to do so because of how the staff will respond… what does that say about whose business it is?
The choice for employee dentists working in a practice may be between working for 40% of a full book on a Saturday or 40% of a half-full book on a Wednesday. Many would choose the extra income from the fuller book
There is enough unemployment out there to get quality staff to work extended hours if your regular staff will not.
3: I’m already working as hard as I can or want to.
Many practitioners who can see the logic of this still avoid extended hours, since they are already working as hard as they want to, and can’t bear the thought of working extra hours and compromising on their family time/lifestyle. What they don’t realise is…they don’t have to!
They can still work the same amount of hours or days, by restructuring their work week.
One option is to work the same number of hours that they are currently working, but alternate the times that you start and finish, in order to attract a wider patient-base.
Another option is to employ/engage another dentist who will work in the facility when you aren’t there.
In my practice I used to alternate working 7am till 1pm and 1pm till 7pm with another dentist. Far from compromising on my family life and lifestyle, they actually improved, as I could take my kids to school and pick them up on alternate days, play golf, go to gym, etc.
Many taxis in major cities have at least two drivers. It is not uncommon for the car to be driven for a 10-12 hour shift, after which the driver, who needs to sleep, delivers the car to the next driver so that it always stays on the road. Why is this?
So that the owner of the taxi can maximise the return on his asset and fixed capital outlay - the $30,000 car.
If taxis do this with a car worth $30,000, why is it that dentists only use their practices on average 32-50 hours per week, when their practices are worth $300,000 and above? The rest of the time the facility’s space and equipment lie dormant.
By working in separate shifts, you could maximise the facility’s usage, improve work-life balance for you and your team, attract new patients, and be more available to existing patients.
Opening extended hours? It’s worth considering…
Prime Practice have been helping dentists and their teams to run successful practices for the last 20 years. Founder and Chairman of Prime Practice, Dr Phillip Palmer has a deep understanding of all the different management, financial and professional issues that face dentists and is regarded as Australasia’s leading expert on the business of dentistry.
Join the Prime Practice team at their next Practice Owner’s Workshop to learn all the fundamentals of owning a dental practice business.
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