Lara Brewood-Green considers the impact of incoming employment law changes and how dental practices must adapt their HR strategy accordingly.
If I think about the conversations I have with practice managers and owners, HR is very rarely the thing they open with. It tends to come out more gradually.
A question about how to handle an absence. A situation that didn’t feel entirely straightforward at the time. Something that’s been dealt with, but still sits slightly in the background.
Most of it isn’t urgent. It’s just part of running a practice. And for a long time, that’s been manageable.
What’s changing now is the context around those decisions.
Over the next year, a number of employment law updates will come into force, covering areas such as sick pay, family leave, workplace conduct and record keeping
None of these changes are particularly dramatic on their own. But they do bring a sharper focus to how things are handled behind the scenes. There’s a bit more expectation around clarity, around consistency, and around being able to show how and why decisions have been made.
Where things start to feel less certain
In most practices, people are doing their best to handle situations fairly.
But they’re doing it in real time.
You’re often making decisions in between patients, or at the end of a long day, without the luxury of stepping back and working through everything in a structured way. So things get resolved, but not always documented as clearly as they could be, or handled in exactly the same way each time.
That’s not a failure. It’s just the reality of how practices operate.
What we’re seeing now is that this more informal approach can start to feel slightly uncomfortable as expectations shift. Not because anything is being done wrong, but because there’s less room for interpretation than there used to be.
Why dentistry feels different
Dentistry has always had its own rhythm.
Teams are small, people work closely together, and situations tend to feel more personal than procedural. At the same time, there’s a constant layer of regulation sitting in the background, which doesn’t pause while you work through a people issue.
Most HR systems haven’t been built with that in mind.
They assume time, distance and structure that simply don’t exist in a busy practice. And that’s often where the friction comes from. As has been highlighted across the profession, the challenge is rarely the amount of HR activity, but how well it fits the way dental teams actually work
Bringing a bit more clarity into the day to day
What most practices are looking for isn’t more to do. It’s a clearer way of handling what’s already there.
That might be knowing that your documentation reflects how the practice actually runs. It might be feeling confident that a situation would be handled consistently, even if it came up again in a few months’ time. Or simply having someone to talk something through with before making a call.
That’s exactly the thinking behind Dentistry HR.
It’s been developed to support the day-to-day reality of practice life, bringing together clear documentation, simple processes and access to experienced HR support when it’s needed.
Not to overcomplicate things, but to make them feel more manageable.
A more confident way forward
The changes in employment law aren’t there to make things harder.
But they do highlight how important it is to feel clear about what you’re doing and why.
For many practices, this isn’t about changing everything. It’s about putting a bit more structure around what’s already happening, so decisions feel easier, situations are dealt with earlier, and there’s less second guessing.
And that, ultimately, creates more space to focus on the practice itself.
This article is sponsored by Dentistry HR.
