What is a dentist and how to become one

The dental workforce is increasingly a worker versus an owner model, and compared to previous years, a graduate can expect to work for another dentist or a corporate entity, rather than set up shop. This is an advantage because, in many areas, density per capita is already optimal, and beginning from scratch is more difficult. The opportunities for employment will be there, as this year’s graduate may be riding the crest of the retiring baby boomer dentists. The ability to advance in the field is also still there in corporate or group practice employment pathways, so a dentist may have managerial opportunities that a historic solo practice might not have offered.

Graduating dentists will leave an educational system based on more limited traditional technical skills and enter a practice world that is more digital and technologically advanced and have to continue learning on the job. Teledentistry, integrated health records, more medically complex patients, the world of third-party payers, and more advanced dental techniques, like implants, await new dentists upon graduation. Continuous education will be a part of professional life.

Past generations of dentists entered a relatively stable system and simply needed to refine skills and gain experience in a set of clinical and management procedures that didn’t change much over a practice lifetime. Like most aspects of society and work, advances meant to improve care and efficiency are now a part of the normal acceleration of the changing work environment. Team dentistry with different partners, new restorative materials, emerging biological and technological changes mean that the environment they enter, described above, is not only ahead of what they left in their training, but a moving target.

In addition to the demands of a technical surgical field, dentists now must be able to manage the disease without instruments, and understand how human behavior intersects with health and disease, as well as how cultural mores and health literacy work in individual patients. Precision dentistry, based on individual needs, will dominate patient-doctor relationships. A dentist is uniquely a surgeon and primary care health professional at the same time. A dentist is also a team leader, directing personnel in both clinical and administrative roles.

New dentists enter the system heavily in debt, with demands of family and other pressures that can affect their work lives. Their work lives are increasingly regulated and controlled by science and government. Marketing and quality measurement, including social media opinions, are a part of practice today and will increase. The days of “rugged individualism” in dentistry are coming to an end, and success will be determined by the application of management skills, communication, long-term outcomes, and demonstration of quality as well as the traditional benchmark of painless dentistry.