The dental nursing role is a varied and rewarding option for people who care about helping others. As a career pathway, it affords several options to advance skills, expand responsibilities, and enjoy constant personal and professional development.
Another way to diversify in the role is to build experience in different practice locations, with different teams, and while seeing new patients. This is a great way of broadening your horizons and gaining exposure to a range of clinical situations, patient groups, and professional thinking, offering inspiration to draw from in the future.
The practicalities
However, this can be challenging to achieve in reality. Firstly, it would require changing jobs fairly often in order to work within several environments. Changing too frequently will likely be counterintuitive to progression because it will hinder development within your role and you may miss out on promotional opportunities if you leave before they become available. Furthermore, it is disruptive for you, the practice teams, and the patients, and will leave future employers with question marks about your ability to commit.
Secondly, the practicalities of changing jobs often may present difficulties – especially if you live in more remote areas where there are fewer practices located within a commutable distance. Constantly relocating is not an option for most professionals especially those with families or other dependants and commitments they must fulfil.
So, how do you unlock the rewards of working in multiple practices without facing these obstacles? The answer may be found in working for a dental provider with various practices, who allows you to move between locations seamlessly.
For some, this is achieved by working in a locum capacity. This affords the opportunity to work in lots of settings and can unlock doors to learning new clinical and soft skills. However, locum dental nursing does come with its drawbacks – namely the uncertainly of volume and location of work, as well as the need to adapt instantly to often very different workplace protocols, processes, and technologies.
An alternative approach
For other individuals, the concept of flexible working between different practices is also available in the market today as a floating dental nurse role. The idea is that you are employed by one dental provider and you work in a number of their practices within your designated area. You get the best of both worlds with the security of employment combined with the flexibility and diversity of a locum position. You are able to work within familiar protocols and processes, as these are replicated across all locations you visit.
Carla McGoldrick experienced the floating dental nurse role first-hand and shares her experience:
“I absolutely loved the format of this role. It provided a regular change of scenery and great diversity in clinical work, including exposure to new fields for me at the time, like dental implantology. It wasn’t your typical 9 to 5 and I really enjoyed that. I was happy to travel a little and could be flexible in where I was visiting each day or week, so it suited me perfectly. Another huge benefit was the chance to build relationships with so many professional colleagues – which is a major difference between this and a locum role. Returning to the same practices every few weeks or months and developing those relationships went a long way to building longevity of my career. I wasn’t aware of any other dental nurses with access to this kind of ‘floating’ position, so it was an innovative opportunity for me. It was like working as an agency dental nurse, but with the stability and security of being employed.
“For anyone considering a similar role, I would encourage you to give it a go. It’s eye-opening to work with so many fantastic teams and patients in your region. It is helpful to be open-minded and be willing to adapt quickly to slightly new ways of working, although this is mostly eliminated by the implementation of standard protocols across the group.”
Options available today
The floating dental nurse role is one of the many innovative career development options available from Clyde Munro Dental Group. It combines flexibility and stability, with the chance to support different clinicians, experience different working environments, help more patients, enhance your skills, elevate your ability to adapt, and earn a competitive salary at the same time. Whether you are covering illness or holidays, boosting numbers at busy times of year or facilitating the rollout of extended services, there is plenty for you to get involved with!
Carla adds:
“Clyde Munro is an excellent place to work with a great bunch of people. I do miss the floating dental nurse role, but I’m grateful for the experience it gave me and the opportunity to move into new areas – I now work in the Clyde Munro HR department. The personal development and career progression with Clyde Munro is such that you can always take your next step.”
Shape your future
The role of the modern dental nurse is a rewarding yet challenging one. For individuals looking for optimal diversity and development, a floating position could be just the solution to help shape the future of your career.
To find out more about the career options at Clyde Munro, please visit https://careers.clydemunrodental.com/
