Teaching clinics
Everything here takes longer, and that is the point of the building
Dental schools and teaching clinics run at a pace that has nothing to do with production. Whether that reads as relief or as torture is the only question you need to answer about this setting, and you can probably answer it by watching the thing on the right.
One procedure, three lanes
Same tooth, same appointment
Meanwhile, your job
All three are doing the same procedure on the same tooth.
Illustrative. How long anything takes depends on the case, the student, and the programme. The lanes are here to show a difference, not to measure one.
Four things that are not true anywhere else you have worked
You are supporting a whole floor
In a private practice you belong to an operatory. Here you are moving across a clinic floor with many chairs running at once, and the person who needs you most in any given minute changes constantly.
Half the job is knowing when not to help
A student learning to place a matrix band badly is the entire point of the building. Stepping in too early is the most common mistake experienced assistants make in their first week here, and it is a genuinely hard habit to break.
The fundamentals get sharper than they have been in years
When somebody is being taught the correct way to do something two feet away from you, every shortcut you have quietly picked up gets held to the light. Most people find this uncomfortable and then find it valuable.
The rhythm is academic, not commercial
Terms, exams, rotations, and breaks. The clinic is busy in a pattern set by a timetable rather than by demand, which is worth knowing if you are building a schedule around it.
A quick test
Read this sentence and notice how you feel about it
You will spend part of today watching somebody take forty minutes over something you can do in twelve, and your job is to let them.
If that made you tense, this is a setting to try for a day rather than commit to. If it made you think about who taught you, you will probably do very well here.
It suits you if
- You like explaining things and are good at it
- You are patient with somebody doing slowly what you could do quickly
- You want your own technique to be sharper than it currently is
- A day with fewer patients and more thinking appeals to you
Who teaching clinics ask us for
- Dental assistant, clinic floor
- Supporting students across multiple chairs, setting up and turning over, and being the steady presence in a room where nobody else has done this before.
- Sterilization technician
- A teaching clinic reprocesses at a volume most private practices never see, and the room is usually staffed on its own for exactly that reason.
- Registered dental hygienist
- Hygiene clinics inside the school, and support to students learning periodontal instrumentation on real patients.
- Front office and patient coordination
- Recruiting and scheduling patients around a teaching timetable is a genuinely different scheduling problem, and schools staff for it.
We staff clinic support roles. Academic and faculty appointments run through the institution’s own hiring and are not something we place or advise on.
Working through us
- The rate is set before you claim
- On a temp shift we are your employer
- Licensing and insurance verified once
- You claim the days that suit you
Institutions frequently run their own clearances and onboarding on top of this. Allow more lead time than you would for a private practice.
Try one day before you decide anything
A single day on a teaching floor will tell you more about whether this setting suits you than any amount of reading, including this page.