5 Top Tips for Dental Practices To Consider When Choosing a Locum Dental Agency.

When your dental practice needs to book a locum dental nurse, what factors do you consider when choosing which dental agency to contact?

With more and more dental agencies than ever before to choose from, it can be tough to decide who gets your first call.

We've been sharing our top 5 tips on what factors you should consider when choosing, or changing, your locum dental agency.

To follow on from last week’s ‘factors to consider’ article on ‘Value for Money’, this week Top Tip No.3 focuses on 'Compliance'……….

'C O M P L I A N C E'

Having touched on this last week, a huge factor to consider when it comes to choosing your locum dental agency should be the agency’s compliance and vetting procedures. Any agency worth their salt should have set-in-stone recruitment processes that meet all legal requirements and mirror CQC guidelines.

Don’t be afraid to ask the agency what their recruitment processes are and ask them to provide you with evidence of this when you book a dental nurse with them. Not only should the agency hold copies of a locum dental nurse’s Right to Work in the UK documentation, enhanced DBS certificate, indemnity insurance and proof of GDC registration, they should also have two employer references on file.

An application/registration form should also have been completed by the locum dental nurse with criminal conviction declarations signed for and their GDPR consent given to enable the agency to share this documentation with your practice. If CQC came to inspect your practice you need to feel confident that the agency you use to supply locums to your practice have carried out the correct vetting procedures and that their locum dental nurses are as compliant as your own staff members.

S4S Team take our compliance procedures and recruitment process very seriously. We know that the implications of not doing so could be very damaging. Not only to our business but to your dental practice too. We take the time to get to know the people who apply for work with S4S Team before inviting them to register with us. We have a fully compliant electronic candidate registration system in place where candidates cannot proceed with their application to join our team without providing us with the required evidence and electronically signing the forms to declare that the information they have provided us with is genuine.

When this initial process is finished we then check, and double check, that the documentation is valid and apply for employer references. Only when this process is complete do we then introduce our new recruits to your dental practice. We also regularly compliance check our existing locum dental nursing team to make sure their qualifications and certifications are kept fully up to date.

Keep your eyes peeled for next week's Top Tip where we'll be looking at 'Quality of Service'!