Experienced professionals
You do not need this explained to you
So this page will not. You know how to work a chair, read a room, and spot a practice that is going to be a problem. What is genuinely still open at this stage is who decides your week, and whether you are still doing this comfortably in fifteen years.
The list did not change. The order did.
Almost nobody writes this down, and almost everybody recognises it the moment they see it. Switch between the two.
The same six things
What changed was the order
- 1
Getting enough hours
Whether the week fills at all
- 2
What it pays
Which never stops mattering
- 3
Learning as much as possible
Saying yes to everything to find out what you are good at
- 4
Who you work with
Whether the room is a decent place to spend a Tuesday
- 5
Control over your own week
Which days, how many, and who decides
- 6
Still being able to do this at fifty-five
Your neck, your back, your hands, your patience
This is what people tell us, not a survey. Yours will be in a different order, and that is rather the point: the thing at the top of your list now is not the thing a job posting is written to answer.
What your years are actually worth, and where
Not in the way a posting means it. Postings ask for experience as a filter. These are the three things it genuinely buys you here.
01
You are useful by the second patient
In a room you have never seen, on software you have not used since 2019. That is not a small thing and it is the actual skill a practice is short of on a Tuesday morning, whatever the posting says it wants.
02
You are the one they ask for again
Offices book people back. Somebody who knew where things were by ten o'clock, left the room right, and did not need managing gets requested by name, and that is how most people here end up with a standing week rather than scattered days.
03
You can read a practice in an afternoon
Whether the schedule is honest, whether the team likes each other, whether the owner is the problem. It takes you one day to know things a new graduate would take a year to notice, which makes you very hard to sell a bad job to.
What it does not buy you is a higher hourly rate from us. Rates are set by category and city and everybody in your city sees the same number, which is the same rule that stops a practice quietly paying somebody less for being too polite to argue.
The administrative half
If you have temped privately, you already know what this list costs
Private temping works, plenty of people do it for years, and every one of them is running a small business on the side without having decided to. On a placement here you are our employee, which is the whole difference.
No longer yours
- Explaining your registration to somebody at the door
- Chasing an office for payment six weeks later
- Working out what to set aside for tax off a stack of day rates
- Negotiating your own rate at seven in the morning
- Filing a separate tax slip for every practice you covered
And if you are quietly working out whether to stop
A lot of people at this stage are, and almost nobody says it out loud. A staffing platform will not answer that for you. It can make the smaller versions of the question available, so you can try three days a week or a different setting without resigning to find out.
- Fewer days, not none
- Most people who are done are not done with the clinical work. They are done with five days of it, and three is a different job entirely.
- A different chair rather than a different career
- A lot of people who were finished with general practice were not finished with dentistry. Ortho, paediatrics, community clinics and teaching floors run at completely different speeds.
- Somewhere else, without resigning first
- Temping alongside a permanent role is how a good number of people find out whether the problem is dentistry or the practice they are currently in.
Set the week you want and see what comes back
Your registration, the roles you cover, the software you know, and the days you are actually willing to work. It takes about the length of a coffee and commits you to nothing.