mission impossible?

So, the various review bodies have reported and, despite some subtle variations from one country to another, the message is pretty much the same; a slightly improved headline rate to cover increased expenses, which should lead to zero growth in net earnings.

In England, it is a 0.9% increase in the NHS contract value which is due to cover inflation and any other increase in overheads. So how does that shape up?

Let’s look at just one very big area; namely “compliance” and I do not just mean HTM 01-05 although that is a large and important part of the whole process. Compliance covers many areas such as information governance, health and safety matters, clinical governance, and many, many more. The operational environment of a dental practice is now heavily regulated in a wide number of areas and set to increase further, so the question is, “Is you practice fully compliant with the law in all areas?”

Without wishing to cause offence, it’s probably a brave person that reaches for a quick response saying “of course”. I think that the arrival of HTM 01-05 will act as a powerful trigger for practices to look at their whole area of operational governance and compliance and I believe that, given the scale of the task, we will see an increasing number of practices paying for a specialist external company to perform an audit of this whole area for them. After all, it’s probably best to take a bit of “friendly fire” rather than fall foul of one of the regulatory bodies soon to be added to in the form of the Care Quality Commission.

The difficulty that dental practices face is that, corporates to one side, they are small businesses where the regulatory framework is multi-layered, complicated and constantly changing and the task of meeting new and demanding standards, as well as ensuring that the existing ones are complied with, is an ever more time consuming and costly task.

I do not know quite how much an external consultant would charge for a practice audit, report with recommendations and presumably re-audit but the word cheap does not leap to mind! In addition, there are also the costs of making any changes that they might recommend.

It could be argued that perhaps mainly NHS practices do not have this challenge as they are so well regulated by their PCT? However, my experience in this area is rather mixed to say the least, so a credible and totally independent external check may be the best route to follow. Indeed, it is interesting to note that there are several companies already starting to operate in this arena.

So, with matters to address such as this, not to mention the other pressures on the cost base of dental practices, suffice to say it is going to be a very well run practice that achieves the same earnings level as before; the phrase “Mission Impossible” comes to mind!

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