Asked for Dental NHS Scale and Polish.Told "Go to Hygienist at £25 extra"

jugglebug

The tuition fee situation is being discussed on another forum I am on.
Honestly the amount of guff some people spout about the so called earning power of various degrees is astounding.
Some folks are all too keen to believe the nonsense doled out in certain newspapers.
Even in my training a few folks dropped out in the 1st 2 years when they realised that they had signed up for a very specific career that actually they didn't like much and the income they thought it would create was a myth.
My own situation? I lost an awful lot of money last year in a practice sale gone bad. (the local PCT decided to take the owners to court to block the sale money being transferred owing to the fact they owed the PCT 90K and the taxman the same) Oddly enough my solicitor suggested that i shouldn't proceed.
Left me with the net result of being down the equivalent of 6 months wages as I was supposed to be paid back pay from the sale money.
Does this mean I had to get by on "only" 50K?
hahahahahahahahha.
excuse me while I go cry into my pint.
Nope. put it this way the announcement that child support payments would be cut for earners over 40k didn't bother me in the slightest. The news barely even registered in fact.

Dentistry is not the money tree the media would have people believe, I drive a skoda and my wife has a bottom spec Ka, that she pays for herself.
I am stuck in some dead end associate jobs with all the plans for my own practice stuck in my head with no money to implement them, even if it wasn't for HTM and CQC making the thought a living nightmare.
Then still I have to put up with the 3 Jags, 10 golfing holiday a year comments :mad:
As it is I do enjoy being a dentist. I have invested in a significant amount of training to raise my game, and am frankly quite p***S*ed off I can barely use those skills. Certainly the NHS doesn't value them and hopefully one day I can move to a practice where they will be an asset not a frustration

welshdent

Take the practice sale gone bad and I have a similar situation as juggle bug. I enjoy the job and what I am capable of providing to my patients however it !!!!es me off that I can not utilise those skills and many people see me as just someone to "rip their tooth out". TBH I feel that ist not what I trained for. I trained to do high quality dentistry to make peoples quality of life better. Sadly the NHS wont pay for it and neither will patients a lot of the time. I can not pay for it myself and I most certainly do not drive a porsche. I drive a second hand mini as it happens. Lovely drive and still get 5 years free servicing

jugglebug

welshdent wrote: »

Take the practice sale gone bad and I have a similar situation as juggle bug. I enjoy the job and what I am capable of providing to my patients however it !!!!es me off that I can not utilise those skills and many people see me as just someone to "rip their tooth out". TBH I feel that ist not what I trained for. I trained to do high quality dentistry to make peoples quality of life better. Sadly the NHS wont pay for it and neither will patients a lot of the time. I can not pay for it myself and I most certainly do not drive a porsche. I drive a second hand mini as it happens. Lovely drive and still get 5 years free servicing

Maybe I should come home to Wales and set up in partnership with you.
(Unlikely as the mrs is a northerner and likes being mid way between inlaws )

boozercruiser

brook2jack wrote: »

Cue talk of new Porsches in car parks, moneygrabbing etc.

Well Welshdent,Coldstream, Jugglebug etc how do you make ends meet on £100,000?

Booze just so you know and can look up average UDA value is £21. You know band one treatment is one UDA.

70% of all dentists are associates ie they don't own practice. Associates earn before tax,NI etc roughly 35% of their gross income. So that means to earn £100,000 before tax you have to do roughly £290,000 worth of treatment.

On the NHS that is 13,600 udas. Taking a standard associate 47 week working year working 5 days a week that means doing 58 band one treatments a day and nothing else (check up ,s and p, xrays etc) . If any of those people need fillings etc you would need to do that at weekends because the minute any one of those people would need treatment you lose money.


That means all paperwork and courses are done at weekends and evenings.

As you can clearly see it is a nonsense that one person can earn this money on the NHS. The average associate contract is for 8000 UDAs but over 60% of all NHS dentists failed to hit their UDA targets last year, so few will have achieved that . The rate of dental inflation is 10% and there has been a less than 0.1% fee rise to dentists for the last couple of years so effectively for the last three years there have been pay cuts.

100% private dentists earn approx 5% more than NHS dentists (overheads are much higher in private practice).

However a small percentage of dentists who put themselves into enormous debt, and work on average 10 hours a week more than associates, buy and run small to medium size businesses. For a few years after qualifying when they are slow and inexperienced, and before they no longer can work at the pace and intensity that earning a good amount entails , they can earn a very good wage. They are self employed business men with all the risks that entails.

I don't earn anything like £100,000 but I don't begrudge those who do. I prefer to have a life outside dentistry and be able to walk away at the end of the day without the constant worry.

ps we train newly qualified dentists. On average at the moment they come out with £40,000 student debt. With the increase in tuition fees this is likely to mean £80,000 debt. I am at a loss to think how any of this generation ,even if they were mad enough, are ever going to own their own practice. Cue more corporate owners who will be the only people able to raise the large amounts involved.

I was of course being a bit 'tongue in cheek' after the following itm which was in the newspapers September 2008.....

The average salary for an NHS dentist has topped £100,000.......

The average salary for an NHS dentist has topped £100,000 for the first time.
Their pay soared by around 13 per cent last year - nearly three times the rate of inflation - following the new contract introduced by the Government to improve efficiency.
The revelation, expected to be confirmed by official figures this week, comes despite the news that the number of patients seeing an NHS dentist fell by a million last year.

In some areas it is impossible to get on the books of an NHS practice.
The pay leap follows a massive shake-up in the way dentists are paid.

Before the introduction of the 2006 contract, their income was based on the number of individual procedures they carried out.
The new system gives them a fixed income for an agreed amount of work.
The change was designed to discourage dentists from carrying out unnecessary treatment, while increasing preventative work.
However, patients' groups say the reforms were botched.

Dr Anthony Halperin, a dentist and chairman of the Patients Association, said the new contract encouraged dentists to 'maximise profits' rather than putting patients first.
He said: 'There is evidence that a lot of the most complex work is not being carried out. It is easier and more profitable to take out a tooth and replace it with a denture than carry out complex root canal surgery.
'Dentists are working the system for themselves, not for the patients.'
The figures were collected from income tax returns by the NHS Information Centre.
They show that the income of average NHS dentists - who spend around a third of the week on private patients - rose from £86,000 to just above £100,000 for a 36-hour week.


NHS dentists are smiling all the way to the bank with a 13 per cent pay increase

In the highest paid category they are earning around £135,000.
The figures are before tax - but after expenses have been paid. A typical dentist spends £70,000 to £80,000 on buildings, administration staff and other costs.
In July MPs on the health select committee said the number of complicated treatments had fallen by more than a half since the contract was brought in. Yet the number of root canal treatments rose in Scotland, where the system was not changed.
The British Dental Association said last night the salary figures were artificially inflated because they covered the change from the old to the new contracts.
Some dentists had been unable to meet their tough targets for patients and would have to hand back part of their earnings.
A spokesman said: 'Dentists are highly- skilled professionals who have spent a minimum of five years at dental school and a year's postgraduate training. The salary reflects that.'
The Department of Health denied the new contracts had inflated pay.....

END....And again...no offence meant...and your 'putting it right' is of course very valid....Thank You.:)

boozercruiser

jugglebug wrote: »

The tuition fee situation is being discussed on another forum I am on.
Honestly the amount of guff some people spout about the so called earning power of various degrees is astounding.
Some folks are all too keen to believe the nonsense doled out in certain newspapers.
Even in my training a few folks dropped out in the 1st 2 years when they realised that they had signed up for a very specific career that actually they didn't like much and the income they thought it would create was a myth.
My own situation? I lost an awful lot of money last year in a practice sale gone bad. (the local PCT decided to take the owners to court to block the sale money being transferred owing to the fact they owed the PCT 90K and the taxman the same) Oddly enough my solicitor suggested that i shouldn't proceed.
Left me with the net result of being down the equivalent of 6 months wages as I was supposed to be paid back pay from the sale money.
Does this mean I had to get by on "only" 50K?
hahahahahahahahha.
excuse me while I go cry into my pint.
Nope. put it this way the announcement that child support payments would be cut for earners over 40k didn't bother me in the slightest. The news barely even registered in fact.

Dentistry is not the money tree the media would have people believe, I drive a skoda and my wife has a bottom spec Ka, that she pays for herself.
I am stuck in some dead end associate jobs with all the plans for my own practice stuck in my head with no money to implement them, even if it wasn't for HTM and CQC making the thought a living nightmare.
Then still I have to put up with the 3 Jags, 10 golfing holiday a year comments :mad:
As it is I do enjoy being a dentist. I have invested in a significant amount of training to raise my game, and am frankly quite p***S*ed off I can barely use those skills. Certainly the NHS doesn't value them and hopefully one day I can move to a practice where they will be an asset not a frustration

Jugglebug....Your final comment....

"As it is I do enjoy being a dentist. I have invested in a significant amount of training to raise my game, and am frankly quite p***S*ed off I can barely use those skills. Certainly the NHS doesn't value them and hopefully one day I can move to a practice where they will be an asset not a frustration"[/QUOTE]

Is a very sad reflection on how things are now with NHS Dentistry If this is really how lots of NHS Dentists feel.:(

jugglebug

Interesting article BC
There are nuggets of truth of course
it is a damn sight more profitable to avoid root treats. (shame I quite like doing them )

I am interested in how the data comes from income tax returns.
I don't know a lot about this but I am not aware that my tax affairs are publicly viewable to anyone but me, my accountant and the Taxman.
I am not paid a penny by the NHS directly as I hold no NHS contract. I am an associate and the practice owner holds the contract. They pay him, and he pays me.
So how the NHS information centre can talk about my earnings is beyond me.
I suppose some sort on anonymised data set could be made available but it still looks a bit ropey to me

coldstreamalways

GDC registration went up by ~30% this year. Dentists have had a 0.1% pay rise. Not sure what's going on in Wimpole street when everyone else is making cuts. My own husband was gobsmacked when I totalled up everything I pay out in a year just to be able to say "open wide". Still, I have made a £500 saving by leaving the BDA and have noticed no difference to my quality of life!!!

Average earnings of £100000 actually made me spray snot out of my nose, sorry for the vulgarity but it really tickled me.

welshdent

I can not possibly see how I can even get CLOSE to 100K doing what I am doing now. I dont know any guys from my peers that could be close either. Possibly a principal but no way an associate.

jugglebug

If it is true about the average income this must be my career

brook2jack

Dear BC

newspapers very rarely get things in dentistry right. Please read the article very carefully. It says these figures are EXPECTED to be confirmed by official figures released later. In other words the entire article is supposition it is nothing more than gossip purporting to be truth. That is then picked up by other newspapers and printed as fact when it is nothing of the sort.


The figures released later were by NHS business services and related to Provider dentists ie practice owners who own practices that ,on the whole, have multiple dentists etc .

Put NHS dentist pay into any search engine and you will get multiple answers mostly ranging on the ridiculous. This is because the vast majority of dentists are associates(not practice owners) and the vast majority of associates do not have their own NHS contracts ie they are paid out of the practice owners contract. So the NHS does NOT have ANY information on the earnings of the VAST majority of dentists, just on the contract details of each practice which may have five or more dentists working there.

We are very highly trained people, we work in what has been proven by research to be one of the most stressful jobs in the world, and most of us work incredibly hard. But it is a job that has many joys. One of which is not the widely held belief that we do a couple of hours work a day, go to the golf course and then count money.

BC you can choose to believe a press article with zero checkable facts , or a forum of dentists (or so we say) who all from personal experience tell you it is utter carp. I know of a practice owner who earned £17,000 last year , I know of three who went bankrupt, I know of one who did indeed earn £100,000 but none of these figures are typical of the majority.