Dental practice manager job description

A dental practice manager’s role is to ensure the smooth running of the practice, which can call for a wide range of skills, from recruitment to marketing to business development.

When you start thinking about your ‘perfect’ dental practice manager, the task of finding them might feel quite intimidating. Luckily help is at hand. We have years of experience of helping orthodontic and dental practices to find and recruit their perfect team member.

We can help you create the right role, attract the right candidates and be on hand to ask those critical questions during the interview process. Personal qualities are just as important as the right skills, and we’ve worked with enough practice managers to know the recipe for success.

If you’re thinking about recruiting a dental practice manager to join your team, the best place to start is with a detailed job description. To find the right person for the role, you need to know exactly what that role will be. To help you get started here is an example job description, outlining some of the responsibilities of a typical dental practice manager.

Example dental practice manager job description

Job title: Practice Manager
Reports to: Lead Clincian

Responsibilities

• Ensure the efficient day-to-day running of the practice
• To maintain good customer relations with all patients and parents
• To maintain good customer relations with referring dentists
• To portray a professional attitude to doctors, staff, patients/parents and to referring dentists
• Observe patient confidentiality at all times
• To be fully aware of all staff’s duties and responsibilities

Staffing matters

• Maintaining knowledge of current employment legislation and being responsible for putting this into practice
• Supervise staff as necessary
• Arrange for the recruitment and selection of permanent and temporary staff
• Arrange staff induction and training
• Monitoring and evaluating training on a regular basis
• Producing job descriptions for all staff
• Organise disciplinary and grievance arrangements –maintain records up to date
• Keep and monitor staff records (to include CPD, holiday & sick days)
• Arrange holiday and other rotas
• Coordinate arrangements for appraisal – monitor its success
• Drawing up contracts of employment for staff
• Ensuring contracts continually meet current legislation
• Producing continual updates to meet agreed roles via the appraisal process
• Organise, attend and participate in practice meetings (take minutes)
• Arrange refresher and update training for medical emergencies and CPR for all staff
• Addressing inner office conflicts
• Encouraging and developing staff motivation and teamwork
• Periodic meetings with Dentists and associates

Finance

• Take responsibility for and supervise all banking procedures, including deposits payments and checking bank statements
• Ensure the operation of the patient payment policy and the collection of outstanding debts – putting into place procedures to reduce client debtors
• Monitoring UDAs and UOA’s, ensuring targets are met
• Ensure petty cash is reconciled at each practice and is doubled checked by you
• Ensure day sheets are reconciled at each practice and is doubled checked by you
• Administering staff payroll, payment of salaries and record keeping
• Producing end of year accounts as computerized or manual records for practice accountants
• Generating monthly financial reports such as profit and loss for use in financial budgeting, monitoring and planning
• Acting with the partners to produce financial and business plans for the practice
• Analysing financial information to identify practice trends
• Liaising with insurance companies to obtain the best insurances for the practice
• Check monthly standing orders and finance payments; check against the monthly bank statements and follow up any overdue accounts

Patients

• Ensure the operation of the practice patient complaints procedure
• Deal with patient queries in a sympathetic and polite manner
• Keep the patient information leaflets, practice brochures and other patient communications up-to-date

Administration

• Keep all practice documentation up-to-date, including policies, insurances, procedures and handbooks
• Ensure the maintenance of the practice computer system
• Maintain the website up to date
• Coordinating functions, meetings, courses and travel arrangements
• Ordering of sundries and stationery
• Monthly practice reports: financial (refer to the finance section) statistics, patients without valid appointments. Treatment Coordinator (TC) will provide you and the practitioner with a monthly referral report, case start report and a NP report. TC will follow up pending patients
• Ensuring a daily back up is in place
• Arranging any building maintenance and repairs – liaise with practice principal
• Coordinate car park/garden maintenance
• Maintaining and improving when required the fixtures, fittings and fabrics of the building
• Dealing with client complaints received by letter, telephone or in person, and handling complaints passed on from reception. Clinical complaints would be referred on to a dental surgeon
• Ensuring good internal staff communications by use of appropriate communication methods such as meetings, staff newsletters and memos
• Ensuring building security (burglary and fire) and drug security for scheduled drugs
• Demonstrating the ability to carry out basic computer troubleshooting maintenance and solve simple problems associated with the practice computer system
• Designing input of financial information
• Demonstrating ability to generate relevant financial details from the computer database to use for practice planning
• Organizing computer training for practice staff
• Assessing training needs

Marketing

• Undertaking SWOT analysis
• Identifying owners’ or partners’ vision. What you do, what you stand for and why you do it?
• Objectives set in the following areas, financial, marketing, customer care, team, training and resources
• Detailed SMARTER targets in financial, marketing, customer care, team, training and resources
• Agree and monitor the process
• Planning, developing and implementing new strategies for marketing the practice
• Identifying target markets within the practice and exploiting their potential
• Designing and planning new services the practice can provide
• Facilitating the setting up of these new services
• Promoting new services through the provision of literature/displays etc
• Liaising with the media and providing information for clients
• Devising sales strategies and implementing and overseeing new sales initiatives
• Organizing the production and distribution of client communication materials such as newsletters, displays, open day material and newspaper articles

CQC

• Ensure full CQC compliance working with practice owners

One thing is for certain, hiring the right individual with the appropriate skills for the job is key its success.