Dumb things that stress dentists

A brave dentist recently posted about their suicide attempt on social media. Stress had played a big part in tipping that dentist over the edge.

Over the past 10 years I worked as a locum dentist in quite a few practices. What amazed me was how badly many of them were run. It almost struck me as if the practices were run in a way to deliberately stress the dentist.

The three big stressors were:

• Nothing was automatic, almost everything required the dentist's supervision.

• The dentist was constantly being asked stupid, unnecessary questions by the staff.

• The dentist had to do many, many tasks that should have been done by the staff.

When a dentist (or any person for that matter) is under stress their ability to think is negatively impacted. Too much stress and rational thought becomes impossible.

Read "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman if you want to find out more about this.

Therefore, in the interests of your sanity and to help you give your best to patients your stress level need to be managed. Low stress equals a clear mind equals good clinical decisions. High stress equals fuzzy mind equals poor clinical decisions.

The more you delegate to the team around you the better off you will be. That will free you to focus just on patients and doing dentistry.

The more decisions you can make totally automatic the better off you will be. That will let you concentrate your mind on the critical decisions – Where will I put this implant? or How can I find the fourth canal?

Of course the two problems above are not the fault of the staff. They are caused by the dentist failing to employ enough staff combined with the dentist failing to train the staff properly.