Welcome back worker bees. Holiday? Wossat?
15 patients including two heart sinks on Day 1 will soon get you out of that ridiculous “happy holi” mode. Those who have been in the exam-result-nail-biting mode have now started to re-grow the cuticles.
But think on for our younger graduates in dentistry. They nibble one set away for finals, another set for the FD1 process and then it seem again. More later
I centred on mixing last time. Maybe it’s the cake that matters, not just the means of making it.
What is the size of the dental market?
It seems to me that the Government know how much they spend [presently £3.31B all in [1] ] but that there is no definitive amount of the ever expanding private market.
The OFT report and our trusty Marketeers, Lang & Buisson seem to think the private market is 42% not including cosmetic stuff, or £1.42B. Well we all smell a rat when it suits the Government and its quangocrats to conveniently play down the private market! Well how weird is that? Let’s INCLUDE cosmetic aspects anyway and just be honest. It’s all business coming through the front door that counts. Unless Tesco are going to not count their cosmetics turnover… Well we all smell a rat when it suits the Government and its quangocrats to conveniently play down the private market!
Let revisit the numbers.
It appears that if the market in 2010 was £7.2B, and 3.31 is taken out for NHS element, the private market now runs at £3.89B. Three years later, can we assume that it is somewhere approaching £4.5B and perhaps continuing to grow?
The problem is, we do not KNOW. All this muttering about EVIDENCE and the one thing we seem to lack in the strategic matter of the UK dental market is DATA
If we believe such surveys as do exist, such as that from L & B, the scale of the private market is heading up to about twice the value of the NHS just as we transition the new contract. How interesting is that, I silently wonder – more and more dentists less and less reliant upon the DH’s paltry pay out ust as they come up with the next version of dental Shangri La.
Why is this market data critical to know?
The future employment prospects of some of our younger colleagues will depend upon the success of the private market.
The saga of the Private Vocational Training Business, and its scandalous squashing by CoPDenD’s refusal to grant FD1 equivalence, just highlights how opposed the Government is to the private market.
The solution to our graduate worries lies in the market of dentistry meeting their needs, NOT waiting for the Government to get its fiscally strangled act together.
Who should gather this data? Is it me? The BDA do not seem overly proactive in this role. Maybe GDP UK has a new project to examine.
Why? Well we simply cannot go on having 60 odd graduates of UK dental schools unemployed at the first hurdle of qualification every year.
The NHS England Joke Squads are making a mountain of unscalable heights in issuing ‘performer numbers’ which are inserting unnecessary and outrageous delays in the ability of younger colleagues to even go to work, even having leapt the ever rising University, GDC and CoPDenD hurdles.
We old goats have a debt of honour to our younger colleagues to create the market and the means that will employ them.
Food for thought? If we knew the numbers we could have the cake and eat it .
Stick that in your mixed practice and give it a stir. :)
1 http://www.nhshistory.net/parlymoney.pdf
2 'Dentistry UK Market Report 2011', Laing and Buisson, page 4. The estimate that the
dentistry market is valued at an estimated £5.73 billion a year is for 2009-10 and does not
include cosmetic dentistry. The value of the dentistry market including cosmetic dentistry was
estimated as £7.2 billion in 2010 according to 'The UK Dentistry Market Development' Market
and Business Development (2010).