Photo by Yusuf Belek on Unsplash
Individuals are burning out at alarming rates. People feel constant demand to deliver, so they're burning out or they're leaving their jobs, aka "The Great Resignation" due to high stress and burnout. The COVID-19 pandemic has amplified this, due to the unknown demands around the return to the office and/or working from home.
For dental professionals, the pandemic created significant stress with the combination of reduced patient visits, or a backlog of patients coming in for dental work, only to discover the patient’s dental health had significantly declined over the past two years.
Stress and burnout cases are particularly high with new dental graduates, due to discovering the long hours it takes to run a dental practice. Patients typically work the same hours that dentists want to work, aka the “9-5” window. So more patients are requesting early morning or evening appointments, or weekend appointments, which fill up quickly.
The administrative tasks required to run a dental practice are often underestimated by dental professionals, as highlighted in Kate Sheppard’s article on 5 challenges dentists face in their careers. Dentists were trained well on dental health, but unfortunately, most medical schools do a poor job on the business aspect of running a clinic. Dentists would love to outsource or hire someone to handle the administrative needs of their clinics, but with gigantic student loan debt, and the costs of clinic space, equipment, dental assistants, etc, hiring admin is often not an option, especially early in their careers.
Patient complaints are always a factor in dental office burnout. People do a lousy job of taking care of their dental health (and often their overall health as well), and they blame everyone else for the state of their teeth. Rude patients being upset about the doctor being late, inconvenient appointment times, etc creates rude patient experiences, which impacts the morale of the dentist and the team.
Team morale impacts communication, and if your clinic has a constant turnover of staff, you’re always in onboarding new talent mode, which impacts patient flow and quality of care. Supporting the needs of your team, no matter how big or small will help you retain top talent and grow your clinic. Continual review with your team on how to become more efficient and improve internal communication will go a long way in reducing burnout in your clinic.