As more older dentists, dental hygienists and dental assistants consider retiring, the industry will have to get creative to fill those gaps.
COVID-19 created an initial hit on dental workforce numbers, which dentistry has not yet fully recovered from, according to Bradley Dykstra, DDS.
Dr. Dykstra, who is a dentist and CEO of MI Smile Group in Grand Rapids, Mich., recently joined the Becker’s Dental + DSO Review podcast to discuss how the industry is dealing with the shortage and the causes behind it.
Note: Responses were lightly edited for clarity and length.
Question: What aspects of the dental industry are making you nervous?
Dr. Bradley Dykstra: I’m not sure anything makes me nervous at this point, it’s more issues that we’re following or that we’re monitoring. One is the aging of the dental workforce. Many of the hygienists have already retired, and in the next five or six years, probably a lot more will. It’s the same thing with dentists. There’s a lot of dentists who are just retiring or thinking of it in the next couple years. There aren’t quite enough young dentists to take everyone’s place yet.
Q: What is causing those shortages of dentists and hygienists?
BD: I would say it’s multifactorial. COVID had an initial effect that we haven’t fully recovered from yet. I think especially in the hygiene world, it’s not so cost effective for institutions to educate dental hygienists. Even if they wanted to increase their enrollment, they would need more instructors, which are also in short supply. Our organization is not sitting too bad. We have most of the number of hygienists we need, but we do use basically subs probably every day in a few of our offices. We’re finding a lot of the hygienists now, they like to sub and go from office to office so they can work or not work if they want.
