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Dr. Muhammad Waqas, BDS – Dental Practitioner
Dr. Muhammad Waqas, BDS – Dental Practitioner
Dr . Muhammad Waqas is a dedicated and skilled dental practitioner committed to providing high -quality oral healthcare. With a Bachelor of Dental Surgery (BDS) degree, he is passionate about updated with latest advancement in dentistry.
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A 90-Day Onboarding Checklist to Retain Your New Dental Associate

9/21/2026 9:51:00 AM   |   Comments: 0   |   Views: 37

 

 



The contract is signed, the start date is on the calendar, and the operatory that sat empty two days a week finally has a name on the schedule. Most owners exhale at this point. The first few months are when a new associate quietly decides whether this office is a place to build a career or a place to collect experience before moving on.

Whether the associate came to the practice through a dental school job board, a referral from a study club colleague or MASC Medical healthcare staffing, the search usually gets the owner's full attention and onboarding gets whatever time is left over. That balance deserves to be reversed, because an associate hire is only finished when the associate is still there a year later.

Why the first hire carries more weight now

According to the ADA Health Policy Institute, there were 205,088 professionally active dentists in the U.S. in 2025, and 17.4% of them were under 35. Careers are also running longer at the top: the average retirement age reached 68.7 in 2024, up from 64.7 in 2001. Owners who plan to sell or scale back in a few years are competing for the same young dentists as everyone else.

Demand is steady as well. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects about 4,800 openings for dentists each year, on average, through 2035. A young associate with a good hand and a clean license has choices, and one who leaves in month eight takes the production, the patients who had started asking for them by name, and the time the team spent training them.

Before the first patient

Start credentialing with the dental plans the office accepts as soon as the contract is signed. Paneling can take weeks, and an associate who spends the first month seeing only fee-for-service patients will read the empty schedule as a sign of what is coming.

Hand over the practical material in one folder: the fee schedule, preferred labs and turnaround times, the office's usual treatment sequences, and the phone numbers of the specialists you refer to.

Build a schedule that teaches

It is tempting to fill the new associate's book with the emergency exams and denture adjustments nobody else wanted. A better first month mixes restorative, hygiene exams and a few longer procedures, with a short buffer after each longer appointment. The associate learns the pace of the office, and the team learns how this dentist works.

Name one person for questions

Pick a senior assistant or the office manager to be the associate's first call for where things are and how things are done, and keep the same assistant chairside for the first several weeks. Put that person's name and extension on the first page of the folder.

Let the front desk introduce them

Patients follow the front desk's lead. If the person answering the phone offers the new doctor as a second choice, patients hear it as one, and the associate's book stays thin with the cases nobody else wanted. Give the front desk a simple, honest sentence to use about who the new dentist is and when they have openings, and have the owner introduce the associate in person to a few long-time patients during their hygiene visits. A two-minute handshake in the operatory does more for a new schedule than any announcement on the practice's social media page, and the team sees the owner standing behind the hire.

 

Put the pay math in writing

Most compensation disputes are about what the percentage is applied to. Walk through a real day sheet together in the first week and show how production, collections, lab fees and adjustments turn into a paycheck. The ADA notes that associates are generally considered employees when the owner controls how the work is performed, which affects taxes and expenses on both sides, and it recommends having an attorney review the agreement.

Put that worked example on paper and give the associate a copy to keep.

Check in before month three

Associates who are thinking about leaving rarely say so at a morning huddle. It tends to surface in smaller ways: a question to a dental school classmate over dinner about how their office handles lab fees, a request for a Friday off that turns out to be an interview, or an updated profile on a job site.

Short, scheduled conversations catch most of this early. At 30, 60 and 90 days, ask three plain questions: What slows your day down? Which cases would you like more of? Is anything in the way you are paid still unclear? Whatever the associate says in the first meeting, fix one piece of it before the second.
Category: Cosmetic Dentistry, Endodontics
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