The business of dentistry

A Queensland college has developed an accredited post-graduate business course for dentists. By A.M. Walsh

It takes at least five years at university to become a dentist in Australia. But with the costs and complexities of running a practice increasing, is clinical training enough to help dentists succeed in the future? 

One dental health business thinks not. Australian College of Dental Education (ACDE), in conjunction with the ADA Queensland (ADAQ), has taken the problem on, developing a post-graduate business degree aimed at dentists and oral health workers. According to ACDE, this structured approach to tackling the challenges dentists face in combining entrepreneurial abilities with their clinical skills is on offer for the first time in Australia.

One of the architects of the new course is Geoff Parkes, a director of ACDE. His background in dental and medical equipment sales and supply, and more recently with Dental Advantage Consulting Group, means he has regularly dealt with dentists struggling to run their businesses.

“If you speak to anybody from finance providers, equipment and consumable suppliers, and dentists themselves, a common problem is that many dentists don’t know how to plan or systemise effectively,” he says. “We set up our consultancy because we thought there was an opportunity to help dentists with the business of dental practice. Like other consultants in the dental market, we offer advice, training and mentoring, but this is mostly to dentists who are already well established.”

“We’ve realised that there is a real need to teach dentists, especially younger dentists, solid business principles starting from the ground up,” Parkes says.

The course will be run in conjunction with ADAQ—a renowned provider of continuing education for dentists. Using a combination of residential seminars and online tutorials (via an e-learning hub), the course aims to be accessible for students from all over Australia and New Zealand. Comparable to other post-graduate degrees, the school will present subjects by semester, with a full suite of qualifications offered at graduate certificate, graduate diploma and MBA level. Individual units are also available for study.

“It’s structured around the practicalities of dental business, using the theoreticals of a business course but applying them to dentistry.” – Dr Brad Wright, director of ACDE

It’s taken the company nearly two years from conception to getting the course to this stage. Accreditation is a lengthy and complex process, but according to the directors, it’s going through these hoops that makes the course worthwhile.

“Various stages of accreditation are all necessary in terms of ensuring that the highest quality course is on offer,” says Parkes. “Anybody can run a seminar based around CPD requirements. This is another step up completely. It is a formal post-graduate study, which is assessable, and so there are measurements in place to ensure what you’re offering meets a certain standard.”

ACDE expects to complete higher education accreditation in early 2014, at which point the MBA, in conjunction with a university partner, will be formally offered. In the meantime, any units that are offered as stand-alone, and are successfully completed, will be able to be articulated into the Masters degree.

The first unit, Dental Practice: Operations and Business Management, begins in July this year. It covers areas such as aligning clinical philosophy with financial objectives; understanding dental profit and loss statements; and constructing a business plan for a dental practice.

Dr Brad Wright, also a director of ACDE, is a practising dentist as well as a former president of ADAQ. He experienced first-hand the difficulties of trying to set up a practice without any formal business training. This first unit is something Dr Wright and his partners know a lot about.

“It’s the A–Z of setting up a dental practice,” he says. “While the other units will be about more generic business topics such as legals and ethics, accounting, IT and human resources, this is probably the one that’s most dental specific and it differentiates our course from a regular MBA. We’re offering it first because this is the nitty-gritty of what will help students.

“It’s structured around the practicalities of dental business, using the theoreticals of a business course but applying them to dentistry.”

For Dr Wright, this is an opportunity for dentists to supplement the important clinical training they receive at university. “The curriculum is full—becoming a dentist in five years is already a big ask. Clinical skills take a lot of time, so the pressure is on the universities to reduce the amount of non-core, non-science subjects,” explains Dr Wright.

“Business skills aren’t taught so dentists tend to learn it the hard way, which is through making mistakes. They realise after a couple of years there’s aspects of dentistry they don’t understand, such as how patients come and go from a practice, how to market a practice effectively like and how to employ and retain staff. People learn these things at the end of their careers when it’s a bit late, when it’s much better to have learnt it earlier.”

“There’s an old aphorism: ‘when the student’s ready, the teacher will appear’ and when students are at a university, they’re not really ready, even if they did have the time,” he says.

Some of the core units stem directly from his own experience. “When I first started it would have been helpful to know how the tax laws apply to dentistry. It would also have been good to know the basics of employment. That’s why some of the early units are based on accounting, and how to employ the right people—basic human resource management.”

In keeping with the growing corporatisation of the dental industry, the course is not just for dentists, but anyone working within the oral health profession. “We hope to get applications from non-dentists such as senior practice managers and public health service employees,” says Parkes. “Anyone within the dental industry who is interested in running or owning a practice.”

For both directors, continuing education is an essential investment for any dentist who’s interested in furthering his or her skills as both a practitioner and a business operator. Less time spent poring over book- keeping or trying to negotiate with staff means more chair time. It is essential for dentistry’s to promote their location and services, both physically for local people as well as online for potential customers from further afield. 

“For anyone who invests in studying the first unit, we would be very surprised if he or she couldn’t quickly turn that into savings in terms of operations and how the practice is run,” says Dr Wright.

Anybody interested in finding out more about this post-graduate business degree should visit  www.adaq.com.au.