Best and highest use

There's one thing that I see practices all over Australia do that I think is just plain wrong.

In dental practices there are two types of people who can generate billable income – dentists and hygienists. The other staff, even though they're indispensable, cannot generate billable income.

A dental practice operates with maximum efficiency when dentists and hygienists devote 100% of their time to doing billable work for patients.

Any time you have a dentist or a hygienist doing something other than working with patients the productivity of the office drops. I've personally worked in offices where I spent upwards of 50% of my day doing non-clinical tasks.

In one office they had an elaborate procedure for checking patients out that took me 12 minutes to do. Instead of letting a nurse handle that I spent over two hours a day doing this task that generated no billable income.

I've seen offices where hygienists are used as cleaning staff. Instead of employing a nurse to do the clean up they make the hygienist do it wasting a couple of their hours per day. Hours that could have been used to generate billable income.

I'm sure the people who run practices in this way would say that they're saving money on wages. Yet, they don't see the money they're losing by tying up the "producers" with tasks that could be delegated.

In the case of hygienists for example, why have someone who you are paying $80 an hour and who can generate $200 in revenue doing a job that can be delegated to a person who is paid $25 an hour.

Would you make Jon Bon Jovi sweep up after a concert?