5 Key Stress Factors Of Dental Clinic Workers And Their Possible Solutions

Dentistry, like other fields of medicine, is a highly stressful environment for clinicians, as they should work with people in pain, kids, and other sensitive social groups that require special attention and an individual approach.

Therefore, most dental clinic workers' days are under constant emotional pressure, leading to burnout and staff turnover. To prevent the team from professional erosion, managers should consider fundamental emotional risk factors and their possible solutions to increase staff retention in their facility.

In this article, we'll review recent scientific papers regarding these matters and systematically explain the baseline of dental team stress.

Main emotional threats

Last month, the British Dental Journal published an article on the UK specialists' survey about their personal work experience. Questionnaires aimed at finding key stressors and challenges in the profession defined many common factors among participating groups, despite the differences in local dental systems and work conditions.

1. Disrupted work-life balance. Many surveyed specialists reported that work consumes all their time and energy, so they can not be with their families.
2. Feelings of failure. Sometimes respondents feel they can not help patients to the right extent due to limitations outside their control.
3. Financial pressure and underfunding are among the most stressful factors among respondents, regardless of their role or place of work.
4. Stressful work with patients. Some dentists even change their work roles to see fewer people during the day.
5. Poor leadership and management. Both specialist groups – from government clinics to private cabinets – reported being undervalued and uncared for by management.

Here, we mentioned only some of the most widespread reported issues, but they are still enough to cause professional burnout and exhaustion, which in most cases leads to three possible outcomes equally unfavorable for the dental facility:

• Exiting the profession.
• Changing roles to reduce stressors/patient flow.
• Taking early retirement.

Briefly, a practice owner may lose qualified specialists sooner or later if their stress levels have not been reduced for a long time and the primary stressor has not been eliminated.

How to solve the issue?

Last year, the World Journal of Advanced Research and Reviews published a comprehensive literature review on human resource management in healthcare, exploring the topic of employee retention in particular. This work also highlights the stressful nature of the healthcare environment and, surprisingly, focuses on some problems previously mentioned in the British research.

1. A flexible scheduling option is a must-have solution for fixing employees' work-life balance, allowing them to find free time for their families whenever they need it.
2. Supportive work culture and professional development options can eliminate the feeling of failure, improving employees' qualifications and confidence.
3. Competitive compensation and benefits are required conditions for every specialist, and practice owners need to balance these elements to fulfill most employees' needs. Managers and workers can also implement financial wellness practices to reduce financial pressure.
4. Mentorship programs and training can teach dentists how to handle stressful patients via psychological tricks and educational methodologies.
5. Regular feedback and communication channels can help employees to share their concerns, which managers can fix before specialists decide to turn over.

Additionally, the article highlights the importance of systematic workforce development as a factor that helps develop a collaborative culture and, therefore, enhances work satisfaction. Such an approach should include education and courses with certification opportunities, access to e-learning platforms, simulation-based training with VR/AR technologies, etc.

Digital factor: double-edged sword

Clinic managers may include various technological solutions to automate some regular tasks or improve the efficiency of the treatment process. However, such tools also require additional training to learn how to operate them properly. Therefore, dental clinic owners should choose software that does not overload the workflow with a sophisticated interface and a slightly intuitive design. Otherwise, the abundance of different digital tools may lead to technostress, worsening the professional's exhaustion.

In Remedico, we perfectly understand the crucial importance of the simple and user-friendly design for clinic management software and have utterly mastered these features in our web-based EMR system, which is dedicated to the optimization and automation of the clinic workflow, including:

• e-signing documents
• automated billing with insurance and VAT
• treatment and prescription interfaces
• Many other administrative tools to save practitioners' priceless working hours

Check out our recent software updates and schedule a demo to try our tools, solving dozens of routine administrative tasks, with your hands.