Hi everyone, I'm Prateek and in this video we're going to be looking at how much dentists actually
earn on the NHS. If you are wanting to see more videos like this including other educational
videos as well as help regarding applications please make sure to subscribe to the channel. So
in this video I'm going to be focusing on how much dentists can earn on the NHS. We're not going to be
looking at private dentistry in this video because that's a completely different ball game. Following
dental school, you have to do a foundation year in order to then work on the NHS. Dental foundation
training and dental core training are fixed values they're a bit more easier to explain to you. If
you look at this current year, if you're currently working as a foundation dentist your salary is £32,796
and this is for a 35-hour week and from this value we need to minus taxes, student loan
and things like the NHS pension if you're still part of it. Once you've managed all of this
you roughly end up taking home over the year around £20,500 - it's not
bad for a first job. Following your foundation year, you can then choose to go and do dental
core training which I've discussed at length in other videos. If you choose not to go into dental
core training then you can go work as an associate which I'll explain later on in this video. During
dental core training as opposed to foundation year you can work in other jobs so for example you
could work as both as an associate and a dental core trainee, but I'm going to be talking about
if you were just a dental core trainee how much you'd be earning. For dental care trainee 1 and
2, the base salary is around £38,693 this year. For a DCT3 it is around £49,000 so
there's about £10,000 difference. However in dental core training, you may do extra shifts,
you may do extra hours, particularly if you're working in MaxFac, you may end up doing on calls
in unsociable hours, nights etc and so these provide you with an uplift on your base salary.
So if you work at night, if you work weekends or if you work above your average 40-hour week, then
you may get uplifts and this varies depending on what you end up doing. For example, if you do nights
you get around a 37% increase for the shift. This ultimately means that you could end up getting
quite a significant increase to your salary. So that's dental core training, if you then look
at specialty training. Specialty training - the base salary is the same as a dental core 3 trainee so
this is around £49,000 and this gradually increases until ultimately, if you get a job as a
hospital consultant, it could be anywhere between £80,000 to £107,000. Again these figures are
for this year. There are multiple factors that would affect this salary, for example experience
being one of them again. With these values we have to remember we would then be deducting taxes from
this. So you'd have your student loan, you'd have your pension if you're part of the pension and
you'd have your normal tax taken off. So all of these values would substantially drop once tax
is removed. So we've looked at dental foundation year, dental core training and specialty training.
So let's now look at if you're an associate dentist working under the NHS and only the NHS,
how much you'd roughly be able to earn. Anything you're earning and the values I'm discussing now
are pre-tax - that's really important to remember. You're going to then have to pay tax at a later
date. Before we can go into discussing more about how an NHS dentist earns, we need to understand
a bit more how the NHS system works. So as an NHS dentist you earn based on units of dental activity
or UDAs and each procedure that you do accounts for a certain number of UDAs. So we then look at
the NHS banding system, all treatment under the NHS is divided into three, technically four bands.
We have band one which accounts for one UDA and that includes things such as an exam, a scale and
polish. We then have band two which is three UDAs and that is for any treatment such as restorations,
no matter the number that you are doing, root canal treatments and extractions. And then we have band
three which is for twelve UDAs and band three essentially includes anything that requires some
form of lab work so crowns, bridges, mouth guards. We also have what we call sometimes is referred to as
a band 4 or a 1.2 - an urgent band so this accounts for 1.2 UDAs and this includes any urgent
treatment that you're doing. The important thing is it's irrelevant how many bits of treatment
you are doing in that band, so for example if you're doing one filling or ten fillings you
would still only get three UDAs - so a single band two for that round of treatment. So dentists earn
using UDAs and we've looked at which treatments provide how many UDAs. Now the dentist will get
a set value per UDA that they do. This value depends on a variety of things and it depends
primarily on the contract that the practice holds and how much they're going to get per unit of
dental activity. These values on the contract are very variable even over an area but we'll use a
value let's say between £20 and £25 per UDA. From this as a dentist you're then going to have
to pay the practice a licence fee which is usually 50% of this UDA rate. So then ultimately if
we take a UDA value of £20 for easy math, you would pay £10 of this as your licence fee
to the practice. So therefore per UDA that you are performing you would get £10. You then as an
associate agree with your practice a target number of units of dental activity or UDAs that you're
going to perform within a time period so typically 12 months. So typical value around 6 000 UDAs for
full-time work - this means you are agreeing with the practice to perform 6 000 UDAs in that 12-month
period. If you fail to meet this target, you then are potentially subject to clawback from the
practice because the practice will have to pay if they fall short of their target and so if you've
fallen short as part of this in order to bridge the gap you may have to pay for the number of
UDAs you've fallen short of and this is sometimes referred to as clawback. A knock-on effect of this
may also be that you actually get a lower UDA contract the following year because it's believed
you're not going to achieve that target again. So if we take this example, you've agreed to do
six thousand UDAs at £12 per uda. This means over a year you'd be earning around £72,000
but from this you then have to minus any lab fees that you need to pay, the
NHS pension deduction, any bad debts with patients these are patients who haven't paid for their treatment
and any other costs, for example PPE if you're having to pay for this. You will then end up with
a value but then you have to remember that this is pre-tax so you're also still going to have tax
deducted from this which is a big distinction from your salaried jobs of dental core training,
dental foundation training and specialty training. You also need to consider any potential clawback
that may be happening because you've not achieved your targets. So there we've looked at how much
dentists earn on the nhs in varying positions like I said private dentistry is a completely
different ballgame because you can set whatever prices you want essentially. I hope you found this
video useful. My recommendation this video is the BNF prescribing app. I use this regularly in order
to help me chairside when I need to prescribe things to patients whether it's in hospital or in
practice. It also has the dentist formulary which is particular for the things that you can prescribe
as a dentist in practice. I'll put all helpful links in the description. If you like this video
please make sure to like, comment and subscribe and if you've got any other video suggestions
please leave a comment or contact me on social media handle. Until the next video - take care!