With running a practice getting more complex than ever, it’s time for a new solution, designed for dentistry – Dentistry HR.
Running a dental practice comes with a level of complexity that isn’t always visible from the outside.
Alongside clinical care, there is a constant stream of decisions around rotas, team dynamics, compliance and day-to-day changes. Most of it happens quietly, in the background, but it builds over time.
As Craig Welling, CEO of FMC, explains: ‘There’s a lot of issues that are complex within the running of a dental practice… rotas, communication, last-minute changes… it all adds up.’
For many practice owners, that pressure is not about capability or effort. It comes from trying to manage people within systems that were never designed for the way dental practices actually operate.
What we kept hearing
In conversations across the profession, a similar picture kept emerging.
Practices had documentation. They had contracts. They had processes of some kind.
But they were often spread across different places, handled in different ways, and updated at different times. Lara Brewood-Green, lead people consultant at FMC, describes it simply: ‘If you’re a dental practice manager or clinician… there’s often a lot of separate documents and paperwork… and a lot of the time that is a very manual process.
‘Nothing on its own felt unmanageable. It was the accumulation that created the strain. Questions took longer to answer than they should. Situations were handled slightly differently each time. Small uncertainties started to sit in the background. And in a close-knit team, those things rarely stay contained.
‘People issues can be time consuming and really sensitive for practices.’
Where the difficulty comes from
Dentistry doesn’t follow a standard workplace model. Teams are small and visible. Practice owners work alongside their staff. Associates sit somewhere between independence and integration. Regulation is part of everyday clinical work.
As Lara explains: ‘It’s not a one size fits all. It’s very much dependent on the dental practice itself and the dynamics.’
Most HR systems, however, are built with very different environments in mind. They assume clear structures, dedicated HR support and distance between leadership and teams.
When those assumptions don’t hold, the systems can feel awkward to apply. That’s often where the difficulty comes from: not the absence of HR, but the lack of something that properly fits.
What we wanted to do differently
Dentistry HR was developed with that in mind.
The intention was not to introduce more process, but to make existing responsibilities easier to manage and more consistent across the practice. That meant creating a clearer structure around the areas that tend to cause uncertainty, and making sure that structure reflects how dental practices actually work day to day. It also meant recognising that documentation alone is not enough.
‘We are there to be a listening ear. We understand dentistry… and we want to make things more simplistic for you’, Lara explains.
Having access to people who understand the context can make a meaningful difference when situations are not straightforward.
What changes when things feel clearer
When people management is more consistent, the impact is often gradual but noticeable. Decisions take less time. Conversations happen earlier. Situations feel easier to approach.
For practice managers in particular, that can create space to focus on the areas of the business that matter most. Lara continues: ‘It enables the practice manager… to get some time back… to focus on servicing patients and growing the business.’
A more practical way to manage people
Dentistry HR has been shaped around the realities of practice life.
The aim is not to add another system to manage, but to bring a greater sense of clarity to something that can often feel uncertain.
That shift is what many practices have been missing – and it is where a more tailored approach to HR in dentistry begins to make a difference.
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