The desk that holds the practice together

Sooner or later, nearly everything in a practice's day passes the front desk. The patient who arrives early and the one who cannot find the entrance. The call that comes in during a consultation. The form without a signature, the payment that did not go through, the colleague who needs a different room.

A study published in the British Dental Journal in 2024 asked the people behind that desk how they were doing.

Asking the people at the desk

Knights and colleagues ran an online convenience survey of practice managers and receptionists in UK dental practices between April and June 2023. It drew 130 responses; 54% of respondents were in Scotland, and most of their work was NHS-related. Of those 130, 41% were classified as having a high level of emotional exhaustion on the measure the study used.

In the same UK survey, 13 of the 130 respondents added written answers. Their themes were growing pressure, relationships with patients and colleagues, and a lack of recognition.

Exhaustion is one part of burnout

The figure needs careful handling. Emotional exhaustion is one component of burnout, not burnout itself, so the 41% among these 130 UK respondents in 2023 is not a burnout rate. The respondents also chose to take part, so they may not represent practice managers and receptionists as a whole.

Nor does the study identify a cause. It does not show that software, manual work or any particular task produced the exhaustion it recorded. What it offers is narrower and still useful: a measurement, with written answers alongside it, from the people a practice's day runs through.

The roles that stay open

Recruitment is a second, separate pressure. In Germany, a 2025 Bundestag paper drawing on Federal Employment Agency data compares two periods for dental practice staff (occupation code 8111). The average completed vacancy duration rose from 73 days, between December 2014 and November 2015, to 218 days, between December 2024 and November 2025.

The clock starts on the earliest date a post could be filled and stops when the vacancy leaves the agency's register, which is not necessarily a successful hire. Only vacancies reported to the agency are counted, and the measure says nothing about staff turnover, administrative time or the reasons for the shortage.

In the United States, the ADA Health Policy Institute surveyed dentists in September 2026. Of 2,422 invited, 750 responded, 704 of them in private practice, an adjusted response rate of 31.2%. Among those who were recruiting, 88.3% rated hiring hygienists very or extremely difficult, and 42.1% reported having filled the role. For dental assistants, the figures were 76.8% and 66.8%.

These percentages describe dentists who were recruiting, not every practice or every post, and the panel is made up of volunteers rather than a random sample. In the same US survey, nearly two in five dentists could treat more patients, so staffing constraints and demand differ from one practice to the next.

Separate studies, one desk

It would be easy to draw a line from the open vacancies to the exhausted desk. The evidence does not allow it. These are separate studies, from different countries and years, about different roles, and none of them shows that one causes the other.

They do support a plainer point. The people who keep a practice's day moving report real strain in at least one survey, and in two countries the roles around the dentist are hard to fill. Protecting the attention of the people already there matters more when they are harder to replace.

SoliumOS is designed to work quietly in that space. It runs in the practice's own cloud and prepares the administrative work around care, so that what reaches the desk is ready to check rather than to assemble. The team approves every step and keeps the final say.

Sources

• Knights J, Batty T, Mills I, UK Dental Team Mental Health Research and Implementation Group (2024). Bearing the brunt: an exploration of the mental health and wellbeing of dental practice managers and receptionists in UK dental workplaces. British Dental Journal.
• Deutscher Bundestag (2025). Fachkräfte in Engpassberufen. Drucksache 21/3356. Data from the Bundesagentur für Arbeit.
• ADA Health Policy Institute. Q3 2026 State of US Dental Economy.