What do you do when a dental staff person can’t come in?
It's never easy to find your rhythm for the day when a dental staff member calls in absent for the day. What do you do in these situations? Your peers would love to know.
I had to hire a temporary dental assistant last week. Thank the heavens that agencies exist in dentistry. I wonder what dentists do if they work in an area without a proper emergency dental staffing company. If someone doesn’t’ come in, do you just work by yourself? Do you bring in a family member?
Of course we know a common solution is proper team cross training. Teaching a dental assistant to process third-party payer claims and having a receptionist memorize bonding protocols isn’t that difficult, though I suspect many of us don’t take the time to do it. But even if we worked to have a cross trained staff, it still stinks to make people pull double duty. Even the best office manager in the world can’t answer phones, break down and set up a room, and check out patients at the exact same time.
I suppose in a perfect world we’d have multiple team members in a certain position who are free to come in when our first line of defense falls apart. If you have two part-time assistants to fill your week, then hopefully one can fill in for the other when needed. Or if you employ two assistants in a single day, then you might be able to pull off your busy schedule with only one.
Does anybody have a great solution here? Let me know in the comments section below. I’m all ears.
Chris Salierno, DDS, is the chief editor of Dental Economics and the editorial director of the Principles of Practice Management and Group Practice and DSO Digest e-newsletters. He is also a contributing author for DentistryIQ and Perio-Implant Advisory. He lectures and writes about practice management and clinical dentistry. He maintains a blog to answer patient questions at ToothQuest. Dr. Salierno maintains a private general practice in Melville, New York. You may contact him at [email protected].
