Your dental office is a busy place, with clients constantly coming and going and receiving the various professional treatments you provide. But you see what clients do not see – that the constant fluctuation of your staff is also a busy and sometimes complicated conundrum of scheduling and staffing requirements.
What happens behind the scenes must function smoothly to facilitate the careful consideration and treatment of clients. And with even more expectations and requirements due to COVID-19, your dental team has more responsibilities than ever.
Strategic Dental Staffing helps you avoid the most common staffing and scheduling pitfalls for your dental practice to run smoothly and maintain a healthy level of profitability.
Poor or Haphazard Scheduling
Poor scheduling that involves no strategic thought or planning is a common pitfall that robs many dental practices of efficiency. No one enjoys their work hours being changed on a whim. Personal schedules are disrupted and planning for life outside of work becomes nearly impossible.
Moreover, this kind of scheduling does not place the right type of skilled worker in the right place to handle anticipated workloads. Dental professionals end up asking where so-and-so is and where they can obtain the professional skills they need on hand when the right people are not available.
Scheduling your employees must follow a strategic design that combines your practice needs with your employees’ needs. A solid, functional schedule serves everyone’s best interests and keeps both employer and employees happy and satisfied. A well-structured and managed schedule should take into account these vital factors:
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- Your practice goals for daily production
- The capabilities and duties of each employee
- An effective plan for time-management
- Seamless cooperation with treatment planning & patient scheduling
The scheduling process becomes tedious due to the huge number of variables that must be factored in, including PTOs, no-shows, or unexpected surges in demand. A broken scheduling system breeds confusion even on “normal” days; abnormally busy or stressful days simply fall apart.
Sometimes you just need help creating a scheduling system that works for your team. Strategic Practice Solutions, LLC can help. Our SPS Dental Practice Management System helps you design/implement a working scheduling process that meets everyone’s needs for stability, efficiency, and profitability.
Often, we recommend a better scheduling software system that allows you to organize your dental workforce and handle unexpected changes. A connected app can even allow employees to manage their own availability, schedule time off, or trade shifts to ensure a full team is always present and ready for duty.
Staffing Shortages
What happens at your dental practice when you have a shortage of skilled and experienced staff? Staffing shortages are the bane of every dental practice. Turnover of experienced personnel from career shifts and retirement makes staffing a constant challenge. Add to that the scheduling challenges discussed above and you have a true recipe for disaster.
Growing demands for trained and competent dental staff are simply not being met in many cases by training programs. The Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) announced in November 2020 that the nation needs 10,716 more dental practitioners to meet the population’s needs.
And consider this: just because a candidate is a graduate of Dental U doesn’t mean they are the best fit for your dental practice. Every local practice has a personality and it takes the right person to fit and blend in with your current team.
More and more, dental practices are realizing the viability of staffing agencies that can remove the intense pressure of reviewing, interviewing, and hiring acceptable candidates. A full-service staffing agency can also handle credentialing, licensing and onboarding tasks, leaving you free to serve patients and manage your team.
A professional staffing agency can help you fill the schedule with skilled people. They can also provide team members to fill in for temporary shortages new positions as you scale your practice and grow your team.
A professional staffing agency can not only help you fill the schedule with skilled people, they can provide team members to fill in for temporary shortages or candidates to fill new positions as you scale your practice and grow your team.
Work with them in partnership for providing all your staffing needs to keep schedules manageable and profitable while maintaining a skilled workforce.
Employee Burnout
Short staff and upended scheduling both contribute to overworked, underappreciated team members and the dreaded employee burnout.
According to the Medscape National Physician Burnout & Suicide Report 2020, 42% of physicians reported burnout. Among these, 55% reported that the number one contributing factor to their burnout was too many bureaucratic tasks (scheduling, hiring, paperwork, etc.). Is this you? Also, 40% of those burned-out physicians are in office-based, single-specialty group practices, such as a dental practice.
What about your dental team? How many of them are simply going through the motions until they can formulate their own exit strategy? Solving your scheduling and staffing troubles can go a long way toward remaking your dental practice into a pleasant, efficient, and profitable entity, for both you and your team.
Strategic Practice Solutions, LLC provides coaching, consulting, training, and education for your dental practice to improve profitability and service to patients. Call us toll-free at 888-421-1808 or send an online message to connect with one of our dental practice professionals with your questions about COVID-19 or any other concerns.
