Managing a dental practice rota is actually super tricky

Managing a dental practice rota is actually super tricky, and it's because of a few different reasons. This post goes into how to drive efficiencies with rota management, and what the impact can be on your practice's bottom line.

The issue at hand is that you have some members of the team that are employed, and nurses often like flexible working, so they might only work three to four days a week. You have clinicians that have to work with nurses but are self-employed and don't have the same obligation to work all the time, and this raises its ugly head when it comes to leave management.

Why it's important to get right

The challenge for dental practices is that staff wages are often the single biggest line item after associate pay, so it pays to manage your rotas effectively.

And if you need to rely on locum support because of last-minute rota conflicts, it can get very expensive. Locum nurses can charge anywhere from £20 to £25 an hour, plus agency fees. They lack the context of how your practice is run, meaning a more difficult day for the clinician, which might also have an impact on your top line.

What goes into a dental practice rota

There are so many factors that go into the perfect dental rota, for example:

• Do we have the right number of nurses and rooms open?
• Have we allowed long enough between patients?
• Have we got the right skill sets? For example, is our implant nurse together with our roaming implant dentist?
• Do we have enough reception cover? You can have peak busy times like Mondays.
• Have we factored in upcoming leave for both clinicians as well as employed staff?

The complexity comes in the fact that the clinician and the nurse are connected in terms of the need for availability, and a dentist simply can't work at full capacity without the right nurse. Dental rotas then become about not just matching diary demand and clinician schedules, but also skill sets, rooms and equipment.

The number one factor

Often, one of the largest bottlenecks is that dentist schedules are managed independently and separately to the rota. A lot of practices still rely on spreadsheets to manage rotas, which don't cost you anything apart from the amount of time and the potential for error that goes on every single month.

The challenge arises because we have leave management in one view, the rota in another view, and a dental diary sitting in one platform, with a spreadsheet to organise and manage it all. What happens when unforeseen leave pops up next week? The whole rota shifts, and it can feel like quicksand, having to fight a fire and rejig the complete diary just so that you're not short-staffed. At the same time, the team on the rota don't get the transparency and visibility into upcoming shift patterns.

Hidden costs of poor rota management

One of the biggest reasons to consider a change is that all of this means your practice manager is spending hours and hours managing that entire process, instead of adding value in a more strategic way back into the practice (with patients, or on higher-value organisational tasks).

Last-minute conflicts and additional locum spend, or perhaps even worse, nurses that are on the rota without any explicit tasks to drive the practice's bottom line. Where you have a nurse scheduled without a clinician, that's a productivity impact of £200. At 25% margins, that means you effectively forgo £800 of top-line revenue. It pays to manage rotas precisely, easily and with confidence.

How Pathway improves dental practice rotas

Pathway helps dental practices who are struggling with roster management by making it easy to assign nurses and clinicians to rooms at the same time. We have a very powerful auto rota, where you can build your rotas week to week and automatically save a huge amount of time.

We also bring dentist schedules in, and it helps where you might have sporadic patterns, particularly implant, perio, sedation or other specialists who might only attend the practice several times a month. We connect that together with your leave management so that you can see who's got leave and get visibility of that. As you build the rotas, you get real-time conflicts where leave is requested, when somebody is off, or when they've been scheduled on a rota anyway. You can manage potential conflicts well in advance and become better equipped to manage your rota.

You also get full auditability, so there are no more fat-finger issues where a cell gets changed in a spreadsheet and some conflict arises that you're not sure how it came about. Pathway gives you a full audit trail of all of your rota changes and all of your leave changes.

If you're interested in finding out how this would work in your practice, book a demo.