Returning to practice
The gap is smaller than it looks from this side of it
Coming back after time away is mostly a confidence problem dressed up as a competence problem. You do not have to commit to a full week to find out which one yours is. You can start with a single day.
Start here, before anything on this page
Your registration is between you and your regulator.
Whether your registration is current, and what a return to practice requires after time away, is set by your college or board. It differs by jurisdiction, by profession, and by how long you have been out, and it can involve currency hours, assessment, or a period of supervised practice.
We cannot tell you what yours requires and we will not guess. Ask them first. Everything else here is easy by comparison.
However you ended up away from it
None of these need explaining to us and none of them are held against you.
- Parental leave that turned into a few years
- Illness, your own or somebody else's
- Caring for a parent or a child who needed you there
- You left dentistry on purpose and have changed your mind
- You moved, stopped, and never quite started again
- You burned out, and the rest worked
What has actually moved on, and what to do about it
Set how long you have been away. Every answer is a question to ask, not a course to take.
Seven things, and that is the whole list
How long have you been away
- Ask on the day
The practice management software
Versions move, and so does where the recall list lives
- Ask before you start
Infection control and reprocessing
Protocols are the practice's and they do get revised
- Ask on the day
Scanning and imaging
The most likely thing to be new equipment since you left
- Ask on the day
Materials and consumables
Usually a five-minute conversation with whoever orders
- Ask on the day
Charting and note conventions
Every practice does this slightly differently anyway
- Ask on the day
Insurance and billing
Rules and codes change on their own schedule
- Probably fine
How they run recall
Worth knowing whose job it is before you need it to be
1
To ask before you start
5
To ask on the morning
None of this is a competence problem. It is a where-do-they-keep- things problem, and the remedy is a conversation before the first patient rather than a course.
The part that is actually hard
It is not the dentistry. Nobody who has been away for three years has forgotten what a periodontal probe is for.
Your hands remember more than you think
This is the part people are most frightened of and the part that comes back fastest. The motor skill is not the thing that decays, and most people are surprised by how quickly the first hour stops feeling strange.
The awkwardness is real and it is short
There will be a stretch where you are slower than you used to be and painfully aware of it. That is not a sign you should not have come back. It is what the first few days look like for absolutely everybody, including people who never left and just changed practice.
You are allowed to say you have been away
Offices book temps constantly and are used to people arriving unfamiliar with the place. Saying you have been out for a while, at the start, is the single most effective thing you can do, and no reasonable practice thinks less of it.
How people actually do it
One day is a complete first step
Temping is unusually well suited to coming back, because the unit of commitment is a day rather than a contract. You are not asking anybody to take a chance on you for a year.
- 01
One day, somewhere undemanding
Not a full week and not the busiest practice in the city. One day is enough to find out what the actual gap is rather than what you have imagined it to be.
- 02
Then the same office again
The second day at a practice you have already seen is easier by an enormous margin, because none of the unfamiliarity is about the building any more.
- 03
Add days at your own pace
Two a week, then three, or stay at one for as long as you like. Nobody here is going to ask you when you are going back to full-time.
- 04
Decide what you actually want
A lot of people who came back to test the water discover they want three days rather than the five they had before, and that the break made the decision for them.
What we handle once you are registered and ready
A temp placement is the same arrangement for you as for anybody else. Nothing about having been away changes it.
Set rates by city
Shown before you claim, so nobody is quoting you less for having been out.
Read moreSort the registration, then book one day
In that order. Once your regulator is satisfied, the rest of it is a profile, a set of days, and a single Tuesday somewhere undemanding.