First time buyer and Newly Qualified Professional

brook2jack

Things haven!!!8217;t been green for many years. Dental earnings have dropped year on year since 2006 . NHS dentistry is coming to an end point , even for corporates like mydentist who are shutting practices more or less every month.
The financial burdens of regulation and litigation are becoming unsustainable.

silvercar

brook2jack wrote: »

84% of dentists are associates, a small amount are employed eg in military or community or hospital. Around 10% and dropping own their practice. Yes their earnings are higher but then they have invested very high amounts in a small business and work longer hours both clinically and in running the practice.

Private practice earns about 5% more than NHS . The fees are higher but costs and time taken are higher. People convert to private practice for quality of life and quality of working life , rather than financial reasons.

Many years ago in the late 80s I worked on dental pay statistics. Then the split between associates and non-associates was around 50/50. Non- associates had higher incomes and higher expenses, but also gained (ie from income from associates). From memory I think non associates average income after expenses was 30% higher. At that time far more dental work took place on the NHS. Aside from highly expensive private work in the likes of super rich areas, about 80% of dentistry was NHS.

*Non-associates are dentists who have their own practices. Associates work in the practice of others, paying the non-associate for providing space and services. The general model in the 80s was that the associate would pass 40-55% of their income to the non-associate. So associates would know that the remainder of their income was their own. Non-associates would have their own patient fees as income plus what they took from associates but would have the costs of running the practice. non-associates tended to be older, more experienced and generally had more private work.

brook2jack

Dentistry in the eighties bears no relationship to dentistry now , particularly after the new contract of 2006, which , effectively cash limited NHS treatment and stopped people being able to set up cold squat NHS practices which was a relatively cheap but hard way for a young dentist to set up their own practice .

The new contract stopped NHS associates having their own contracts and so percentages fell to 30% to 45% renumeration . However eg in my area 84% of dentists do not reach their NHS targets so have to pay back money to the NHS each year. It’s very difficult to hit UDA targets particularly for the newly qualified like the OP and particularly if your patients have high needs. Hence a 35% fall in remuneration since 2006 and growing each year.

Dental incomes have been in free fall because the costs of both practicing are rocketing eg indemnity has gone from £1800 pa to £5200 in a couple of years. Last year it rose £500 , and the cost of meeting new regulations is rocketing whilst NHS payment for UDAs (units of dental activity) has remained static or fallen for the last 10 years.

All dentists do more private work than they used to , it’s about the only way a practice can keep going , although the expenses are much higher .

The cost of student loans , price of property and pay rates for newly qualified dentists mean something few will be able to Be eligible for the loans to buy a practice. The enormous expansion in regulation (3000% in ten years) and corresponding work and stress means many older dentists have sold up practices to become associates again or are just not buying into practices. The workload and stress involved is just too much for many .

Even the large Dental corporate groups who bought many practices are now shedding many as they cannot make NHS dentist pay .

lb200

Thank you brook2jack

I do have a guarantor if needed. And I know my other half does too. You are correct I am just going through dft 1 at the moment. And then I will be stopping on at my practice to be an associate. Luckily the UDA value is higher than average at the practice, due to a high contract value. I’ve always said as long as I can match my foundation salary I am not bothered as I can comfortably live on that. So factoring in indemnity, lab bills etc hopefully won’t see much of a decrease compared to this year. But I agree, I went to one of the indemnity head quarters a couple of weeks back and the fees are absolutely ridiculous.


Spoke to a fellow foundation dentist who’s in the same position as me at the moment but she hasn’t got her job guaranteed for next year and Natwest have just approved her mortgage. So trying to take some positivity from that. But will definitely keep saving as much as I can to build a bigger deposit in case things do fall through this time.

Thank you for the advice !!!128578;