96 Per Cent of Dentists Hard to Retire

According to the American Dental Association, around 96 percent of dentists find it hard to maintain their lifestyle and retire. They lead a life of control and always in charge of their practice. They see all patients or supervise what happens in the clinic. Dentists spend a lot of time being dentists and the clinic depends on them.

Most of the time, dentists do their own payroll, accounting, HR work, and keeping their books. They are doing duties that they should not be doing themselves. One of the reasons why dentists are stretched too thin is because they have too many roles that they could have delegated to others. It is common for a dentist who runs one’s practice to handle all the patient appointments, staff concerns, HR issues, most of the business side of the practice, and the scheduling and collecting.

Dentists want to be in control of all the areas and become distracted. They produce revenue by doing the tasks of a dentist. When the dentist is not doing dentistry, the dental clinic is losing revenue.

Having more staff is not the answer. It is important that the dental staff is accountable. There are some dental practices that the staff doesn’t take appointments on certain dates because they had other plans.

There are some dentists who welcome impromptu sales calls. While dentists have retirement in their mind, a sales person might drop into the office and get the dentist’s attention. They would be taken by the sales talk and buy a financial product and think they have done something about their retirement.

Another factor that impacts their ability to retire is that dentists work hard. They think that dentistry is an honorable job but there are times when working hard can have negative returns. A lot of Americans envy their dentists for taking Fridays off but in reality, dentists are doing non-dentist tasks during their day-off, such as bookkeeping and collections.

Photo by Travis Lee Clark [Public domain], undefined