Dr Phillip Palmer, Simon Palmer, May 2012 -

When young dentists used to finish dental school, the career path was clear. Practice ownership was pretty much a given for dentists at some point in their careers. After a few years of working for someone you bought a practice and worked in it until you were ready to retire at which time you sold.

This predictable traditional model has faded in popularity for many reasons over the past years and a dentist’s career path is far less assured than it used to be.

Lately, it is not uncommon to come across dentists with career paths that were unheard of several years ago:

- Dentists with no intention of ever owning a practice;
- Dentists that own several dental practices;
- Non-dentists (including business people and companies) that own several dental practices;
- Dentists who own practices that they never work in.

With these new career paths come opportunities for business owners to take advantage of. But in order to do this we need to first identify and understand the influences that are creating these new career paths for dentist.

The rise of the non-owner dentist
While traditionally, practice ownership used to be a given at some point in the vast majority of dentists’ careers in Australia, a significant percentage of new dentist graduates will never own a dental practice. Several factors are leading to this shift including:

• Shifting demographics: The rising percentage of women in the workforce that have family commitments limiting the time they have to run a business.
• Increased barriers to entry: The relative cost of what it takes to set up a modern digital practice with equipment, sterilising, etc is far more than what it used to be;
• The burdens of ownership: There is also is more and more legislation on compliance issues relating to running a business and the practice of dentistry (workplace relations, sterilisation, accreditation, etc). The more the burden of ownership increases, the more dentists will choose a career employee/contractor path.

The acceptance of practice management
Traditionally dentists were ill-equipped and under-prepared for the business, management and leadership skills that it takes to run a successful business. Without any formal training they ran their practices to different levels of success through trial and error. The last 10 years has seen the widespread acceptance of the benefits of practice management training. With proper practice management training, a practice owner can take a step back from the practice, comforted in the knowledge that:

- All team members know their job descriptions and quality control is ensured by a set of systems and procedures and reviews for all tasks in the practice.
- There are Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to look at for a quick health check assessment of how well the practice is doing.

When the practice owner is less bogged down with these, some of them become freed up to scale up their operations and start applying the same knowledge, systems and processes to more than one practice.

IT for accessibility and quality assurance
The proliferation of email, internet and mobile devices has meant that greater oversight of a business can happen from afar. A business owner can be contacted and respond to a crisis from anywhere.
More advanced practice management companies are now offering quality assurance tools for their practices to allow them to get objective feedback on the patient experience. These tools include things like mystery telephone shopper reporting and dental patient surveys on i-Pads (or other tablets) for patients to fill out upon checkout. This allows objective reporting on the patient experience without the owner needing to observe it.

Where this is heading...
It is an exciting time to be a dentist... much more so than when many dentists graduated. The changes mentioned above have given dentists business opportunities that would have never been possible before.
It has allowed dentists to scale up their operations in ways that previously wouldn’t have been possible and it has given dentists a new exit plan – retiring from the practice of dentistry to being purely a practice owner.

It has provided dentists with the tools to be an absent owner of their practices, reassured that their business training will give their practices the structure, and good IT will give them the oversight that they need to make sure that things run smoothly.