A capacity-led private patient growth plan for UK practices

Disclosure. This site is published by the company behind Dental Mastery, which works with dental practices on marketing and enquiry follow-up. Everything here works with or without any supplier.

Most growth plans I see start with a tactic: a new website, an advertising campaign, a social media push. The tactic is chosen first and the practice finds out afterwards whether it had the clinical time, the right clinician or the right fee to make it worthwhile. I start the other way round. Begin with the chair time you can genuinely offer and what each treatment leaves after its direct costs, then decide what to promote.

Why start with capacity

Marketing can only fill time that exists. If the clinician who provides a treatment is booked solid for the next ten weeks, more enquiries for that treatment lengthen the wait and frustrate the people who asked. If a hygienist has a quiet afternoon every week, that is time the practice is already paying for. A plan built on spare capacity aims effort at the gaps, and tells you early where the real limit sits: a clinician, a surgery, lab turnaround or consultation slots.

Step 1: measure spare clinical time

For each clinician, over the next twelve weeks, write down:

1. contracted or planned clinical hours;
2. hours already booked;
3. hours typically lost to failed appointments and late cancellations, from your own diary history;
4. which treatments that clinician provides and is willing to do more of.

Spare capacity is planned hours minus booked hours, adjusted for what you know the diary loses. Then check the supporting resources: nurse cover, surgery availability, lab or aligner turnaround, and slots for consultations, which come before any treatment starts. Whichever runs out first is your ceiling.

Step 2: contribution per treatment

Fee alone misleads. For each treatment you might grow, work out its contribution: the fee, minus the costs that only arise because that treatment happens (lab fees, materials, any clinician pay that is a share of the fee, finance provider charges). Then divide by the total chair time it needs, including consultation, review and fitting appointments. Contribution per clinical hour is the figure that lets you compare a long treatment with a short one.

A worked example, with round illustrative figures that are not benchmarks and not typical of any practice: a treatment with a £2,000 fee, £500 of lab and materials and £600 of clinician share leaves £900. If it needs three hours across all its appointments, that is £300 per clinical hour. A treatment with a £400 fee, £150 of direct costs and one hour of chair time leaves £250 per hour. Use your own numbers. They will differ.

Step 3: choose what to grow

Pick one or two treatments, not five. A good candidate has all three of these:

• spare capacity in the clinician who provides it, now, not after a hire;
• a contribution per clinical hour you are content with;
• a clinician who wants to do more of it, and a team who can explain it clearly.

The implant and aligner planning guide works through this for two common choices. Treatments that fail the test are not dropped; they are simply not where the next ninety days of effort goes.

Step 4: a 90-day plan

Ninety days is long enough to see consultations turn into started treatment, and short enough to change course. For each chosen treatment, write down:

• the target: started treatments over the quarter, no higher than the spare capacity allows;
• the sources of demand: existing patients who have asked about it, word of mouth, your website and paid search, in that order of effort;
• the actions, one owner each, spread across the twelve weeks;
• review points at weeks four, eight and twelve.

The 90-day growth planning worksheet lays this out to print and fill in. Word of mouth is usually the cheapest source to organise properly; the patient referral process shows one way to do it.

Step 5: measure started treatments

Enquiries and website visits are early signals, not results. Track each stage every week: enquiries, consultations booked, consultations attended, written treatment plans issued, and treatments started. Under the GDC standards a written treatment plan is given before treatment starts ^[3], so plans issued is a stage you can count reliably. Started treatment is the measure that matters, because it is the only one that uses the capacity you planned around.

If the counts fall away between two stages, that is where the next change goes. Where the fall happens between enquiry and consultation, the follow-up is often the gap; this is the area where Dental Mastery works with practices on marketing and enquiry follow-up.

Guardrails

• Clinicians make clinical decisions. A growth plan decides what the practice promotes, never what a patient needs. The GDC expects patients' interests to come before any financial gain ^[2].
• In a mixed practice, patients must be told which treatments are available on the NHS, and must not be pressurised into private treatment ^[2].
• Patients are given the options and their costs, and a reasonable amount of time to decide ^[4]. A target never justifies chasing a decision.
• Promotion must be accurate and not misleading, and must not create an unjustified expectation about results ^[1].