The bro culture lives on

A while back, I wrote an article about the Bro culture in dentistry; you can read it here.

I was in conversation with a young dentist the other day and they were talking about the difficulties they had experienced finding a dental “home”; a practice they felt comfortable in and that treated patients well.

A phrase this dentist used was the “bro culture”when desrcibinf sme practice owners. I asked them what they meant by this.

They talked about small corporates where the owner had been on a weekend course in running a practice and scaling up; where the focus was on efficiency and throughput rather than building relationships; where there were unrealistic targets set in the presence of gappy books, poor support staff, and multiple preferred provider contracts that impacted the fees that could be charged; where the owners had lost interest in providing clinical care and perceived themselves as businessmen/people; of being owed thousands of dollars in earnings.

Don’t get me wrong, just because you own multiple practices does not mean you treat your employees badly or not care for your patients. Because you’ve been to a practice management course does not mean you would implement what you have learned in a purely selfish fashion; these are choices the practice owners have made.

It's most probably more a case that the focus of these individuals was always more about the money they could earn as a dentist, rather than perceiving themselves as healthcare providers, and that attending the course encouraged and validated this approach to dentistry.

With the rise of corporate dentistry in recent years, finding a good job when starting out seems to be becoming harder.

As much as there’s bad players in every industry, there are also good ones.

I worked for a corporate for a majority of my career and it was fantastic in the way it looked after its patients and its staff. I did this when corporates were raer and were preceived as the enenmy by the dental associations. More recently I have worked for a corporate as a locum and the experience has been positive.

For the young dentist, the challenge is to search out the good jobs and have the courage to leave a bad one.

For the corporates whatever their size rise to the challenge of genuinely nurturing your young dentists at the start of their careers. Thats the way to keep them.

Rosie