The West Country - Regional news

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Hi everyone in the West Country region.

Now the annual conference has come and gone we are looking forward to the autumn regional seminars. By now you should all have received a flyer inviting you to the seminar entitled ‘The Survivors Guide to Hiring and Firing’. This will focus on the many stages of how to develop a great team of people at your practice. I’m sure all of you will agree it is essential to have a devoted team around you when trying to run a busy practice.

Covering your staff holidays

One of the biggest problems I have with my team at this time of year is trying to co-ordinate all the holiday requests. It’s a headache when nurses want holiday at different times to dentists and vice versa. When the dentists are away how do you keep your nurses fully occupied and likewise when the nurse is absent can you get nursing cover and how much will it cost you from an agency?

At my practice we tend to have a policy that the nurse should take two weeks holiday a year at the same time as their dentist and have another two weeks of their own choice.

I would be interested to know the policy that your practice adopts for this problem. Send me an email and I can pass it on to other members.

Local Dental Nursing Agencies

Good agency nurses are hard to come by and they always seem to be booked up months in advance. Therefore if you have someone call in sick even the day before it’s easier to fly to the moon than get agency cover. I use tooth fairies mostly but have a couple of individual nurses who are also very good.

I would like to compile a list of good dental nursing agencies in the area and share this information with you all. If you could recommend the ones you use to me it would be great. We can then have a list of contacts to help make this problem a little less stressful one when you get that call at 8 am in the morning!

Watch this space for more info on that.

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