Teamwork vital at every level in the bush

Building a successful dental practice outside the metropolitan areas of Australia's major cities is often touted by many as being far easier than the competition-intensive urban environments.

Life in the country, however, presents special challenges of its own; challenges that Broken Hill dentist, Dr Greg Cocks, has in the past battled on a daily basis.

"One of the big problems with living in regional Australia is that nothing happens in a hurry," he explains. "From the point of view of running a dental practice, that means you need to ensure you carefully plan your inventory of consumables and that you purchase them from a reliable supplier who delivers on time with minimal back-orders. If you run out of a critical product, then you're in trouble.

"You also have to try and minimise equipment failures, because there are no service technicians in this town and the city is a long way away."

Broken Hill is located on the Barrier Range in the far west of NSW, 1160 km from Sydney and a five hour drive from Adelaide.

Dr Cocks has grown the aptly name, The Dental Centre, over an 18 year period from one Morita Mermaid-equipped surgery, with an annual turnover of $130,000 in 1984, to today where he has one of the best practices in the country, equipped with modern, well-maintained Siemens and Sirona equipment suffering zero down-time from equipment malfunction.

"Our stress levels are low, our job satisfaction is very high, we work with the best possible equipment, the nursing staff are all happy as the equipment is so easy to clean and maintain and we work so efficiently that our turnover this year will exceed $1.25 million with expenses before tax of around 64%, which makes us one of the most profitable practices in Australia (according to the most recent figures from the Australian Taxation Office and national benchmarking statistics)."

Dr Cocks attributes a large part of the success of his practice with establishing a close relationship with Halas Dental, both for the supply of dental products for the practice and the support and maintenance of the equipment through their Routine Service Maintenance Program.

"In the past, we probably had a mechanical malfunction every three months," he recalled. "I used to have to try and fix it myself. If I couldn't, a technician from Adelaide would come up and fix it, which was expensive. The inevitable result of any problem would be down-time at around $3000 per chair per day.

"Four years ago, when Halas introduced the Routine Service Maintenance Program, we immediately joined. It's probably the best money I've ever spent. I now know that every day we're open, the equipment will work and if it doesn't, then Halas will be here to fix it fast."

Dr Cocks attributes his confidence in Halas service and support to the skill of the company's national service manager, Peter Burns, together with the team of well-trained and experienced service technicians.

"It's all well and good for someone to sell you something, but you want to meet the guy who is going to install it and support it," he said.

"It's like buying a BMW. It's an excellent quality product but you acknowledge that something is going to go wrong occasionally and you want to know that it's going to be fixed. And fixed fast."

Dr Cocks works closely with Halas NSW service manager Stephen Beckedahl, whose territory includes, coincidently, his hometown of Broken Hill. Based in Sydney, he generally visits Dr Cocks, one of the other two practices in the Silver City and his father twice a year.

Mr Beckedahl is an electrician by trade and worked for six years in the mines in Broken Hill and then on and off for several more years in the area. He has worked for Halas for the past eight.

"The idea of the Routine Service Maintenance Program is to prevent problems from occurring in the first place by keeping the equipment in top condition," he said.

"If a problem does occur, then we will attempt to solve it over the phone or ship the part for the dentist to install. If it cannot be fixed easily, then we will come out to the practice to fix it.

"We come to Broken Hill once or twice a year and the idea is to keep all the equipment in top condition so failures are minimised. We service the dental units, the x-rays and autoclaves at the same time.

"We generally call a week or so ahead of time and make sure if there are any problems, we bring the correct parts with us to minimise the inconvenience to the practice.

"We have a checklist for each piece of equipment that we run through and we replace certain parts at regular intervals. We have extensive information on the life of all the components from our own experience and from Sirona in Germany.

"Sirona provides service kits that include "O" rings, filters and diaphragms and we replace what we deem necessary based on how the product is used.

"All kit parts and labour are included in the cost of the Routine Service Maintenance Program. If some other part is found to be faulty, like a pump, we charge for that but generally we can install it as part of the maintenance visit."

Mr Beckedahl said that the Routine Service Maintenance Program is as applicable for city dentists as it is for rural and regional practices.

"We used to visit one dentist in Sydney who would literally call us once or twice every month to fix problems with his equipment. That's expensive - there's a call out charge, labour and parts.

"Since he went onto the Routine Service Maintenance Program, we now see him once or twice a year and his costs have reduced considerably. They actually ring us now when the routine service is due."

Despite being a very cost effective method of maintaining practice equipment, both in terms of reducing the cost of excessive service callouts and revenue lost through equipment downtime, Mr Beckedahl, says that to date, only a small number of practices have taken advantage of the plan.

The Halas service department, which installs new equipment and services existing installations, employs a total of 34 people Australia-wide, with 13 in NSW, nine in Victoria, four in SA, three in WA and five in Queensland.

"The idea of building such a strong relationship with a supplier is a foreign concept to many city dentists," says Dr Cocks. "But it was literally in doing so that motivated me to take my business to 'the next level' and to encourage my staff, both chairside and clinical, to set higher standards in their professional and personal lives."