Every new practice is an opportunity to gain new experiences, meet new patients, work with new professional colleagues, try different things and hopefully learn and develop in some way.
This is just as true whether you have only recently graduated, or whether you have moved to what might be the last place you intend to work before retirement at the end of a long career. This might also affect the way in which you view your new place of work.
Contracts
The time to put an agreement in place is before you start working in a new practice, when goodwill on all sides is hopefully plentiful. This is important whether you are working as a self-employed associate or employed assistant in somebody else's practice, or working as a principal in some kind of expense-sharing arrangement or partnership. Each of these options carries different advantages and drawbacks, challenges and risks. For some aspects of any or all of these variations on professional working arrangements, it is sensible to take your own legal advice.
Avoid assumptions
In starting work in a new practice, you may also have moved to a new area and if so, it is unwise to make assumptions until you have learned a little more about the locality and the people who live and work there. You may encounter communities which are quite different from those that you might have worked in previously - in terms of language, culture, diet and other considerations. Their dental needs may be different from anything you have seen before, and this may translate into a demand which is greater, reduced or simply different. This in turn may be affected by local socio-economic conditions, whether the practice is located in a business district or a residential area, the average age of the local population, and so on.
Very often the practice staff are the people best able to fill in these information 'gaps' for you - don't be afraid to ask them.
It is a bad idea to assume that things will be done in your new working environment in much the same way as in other places where you have worked. This is very rarely the case and it is safer to work on the principle that things will not be the same, unless confirmed otherwise.
Good news
When you arrive in a new practice, you have the opportunity to make a fresh start with a new group of patients and new work colleagues. There are no problems with any past treatment and no worries in respect of any patients who are dissatisfied with something that you have previously done or not done.
Bad news
You are, on the other hand, in somewhat unknown territory. Everything is new and unfamiliar and that in itself can be disorientating and perhaps stressful. There are many risks concealed within this lack of familiarity and they need to be recognised, understood and carefully managed.
In addition to not knowing your way around (this is less of a problem in a small practice), where things are kept, how things work, who does what etc, one may be naturally cautious about appearing too inquisitive or even 'pushy' as soon as you walk into a practice. It may be sensible to ask the practice owner who is the best person to talk to about issues such as this.
Changing the place where you work sometimes happens at the same time as changing the place where you live. While this combination adds to the pressure and slows down the process of adapting to what is possibly a variety of different changes, all of them happening at once, for most of us we are at least still doing the same job – and that is likely to be a lot less stressful than changing your job entirely.
Expectations and promises
Everyone who starts out in a new job has hopes and expectations about how it will turn out. Sometimes these are based upon the wording of a job advertisement or statements made at an interview - they may be firm promises and undertakings, or you may simply have been reading between the lines and making a few hopeful assumptions of your own. Rarely does anything turn out exactly as we had hoped and expected, and reality generally consists of fair bit of what we had been led to expect, mixed in with a combination of a few pleasant surprises and sometimes a few disappointments too.
You don't win many friends by continually focusing on the small niggles, no matter how frustrating they are. Of course it is important to dig your heels in on the really important stuff - like patient safety and anything that impedes the quality of patient care that you can provide. Much depends, of course, on how you raise these concerns and on the relationship you have with the people who own, operate and/or manage the practice – that is, the people who are in a position to put these things right. There is all the more reason to cement these relationships at the earliest possible stage, so that you can fall back upon them if and when the need arises.
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