The golden rule when buying into an existing practice is not to introduce too many changes at the start. “Try not to rock the boat,” goes the conventional wisdom. Some, like Dr Meredith Gay, however, are not bound by truisms.
About three years ago, the NSW dentist reached out to Dr Michael Johns, the principal dentist at Dr Michael Johns Dental Surgery to discuss the prospect of buying into his practice.
The pair hit it off immediately paving the way for Dr Gay to start as an associate dentist in June of 2019. The plan was that she would first establish herself in the longstanding practice with the intention of buying it.
At the time of their meeting, Dr Johns was in the process of looking for a new location to move his practice to. By middle of that year, they had secured a new home for the practice and the two dentists found themselves getting ready to relocate from the long-standing location.
The practice soon moved to its new location and transition of ownership was finalised on the very day the practice reopened in its brand new location – with a new name! So much for the golden rule!
Howdy partner!
Over the coming years, Dr Gay set out to grow the practice, increasing it from three to five surgeries. Even as the dentists ushered in the new, they haven’t completely forgotten the old. At least not when it came to their choice of dental chairs!
For the expansion, Dr Gay bought two new Swident Partner dental chairs, a DMEGA Teravac 6000 suction motor (for 3-4 chairs), and a Nardi compressor 90L (for 3 chairs) to work with her current set up. She credits Louis Rouessart from LR Dental Services for the buying decision.
“Louis was the one who installed the chairs with the initial move and took care of all our equipment maintenance,” says Dr Gay.
When it opened in the latter part of 2019, Beaches Dental had two Swident chairs (an old and new unit). Now in 2022 they have four Swident Partner chairs and one older Swident XP1 chair.
All the new chairs were purchased from Ampac Dental, an international distributor of large and small European and American supplies as well as equipment.
Ampac Dental’s extensive range of global brands includes: NSK handpieces, DCI spare parts and components, MELAG autoclaves, L&R ultrasonic cleaners,
Monitex curing lights and alginate mixers. It is also the exclusive Australasian distributor of Swident dental units, Nardi compressors and Dmega suction motors.
Fuss-free operation
The expansion brings the floor space to almost 200-sqm and team size to eight dentists and eleven support staff. As it stands, Beaches Dental now has five Swident units, four of which are Swident Partner chairs.
“To me, a good quality dental chair is up to date, and allows us to provide a lovely patient experience, without necessarily being the most expensive chair on the market,” says Dr Gay.
“The nice thing about the Swident chairs is they are not overly complicated. They have a basic design that works really well. They are economical and compact with a small footprint, but have everything you need.
“In terms of ergonomics, everything is where you want them to be.”
Feature-rich dental units with a complicated user interface do not impress Dr Gay.
“When you’ve got a patient in such a chair, sometimes finding the right settings can be rather challenging – especially if you don’t use it as frequently,” she adds.
“In our practice, our dentists can move from one room to another depending on the day, so we opted to standardise all the rooms with the same Swident chairs.
“You don’t need a lot of experience to operate the chair and use it to its fullest capacity.”
Lockdown challenges of new set-up
To explain her decision staying with the same chair model and supplier, the recurring word Dr Gay uses is “reliable”. It was used to describe both the workhorse built of the Swident chairs and the technical support teams at Ampac Dental.
Recalling the difficulty of setting up the site expansion during the COVID lockdown period, she says that Mo and Elizabeth (both from Ampac Dental) made the process easier with their proactive and accommodating ways.
“We had the lockdown shortly after we started building in December. Although we had ordered all the equipment by then, we could only take delivery of each unit in stages due to all the restrictions imposed on the builders,” she adds.
“Both Mo and Elizabeth were super flexible in the way they organised all the transportation and delivery to accommodate the haphazard building schedules.”
I’ve got no issues
Dr Gay calls her Swident units “middle of the road” kind of chairs, meaning they are not too basic or overly complicated.
“It’s just a nice good looking, comfortable and user-friendly chair with a good price,” she summarises.
“I’ve used a few different chairs in my lifetime. To be honest, I’ve liked a whole lot of them but noticed that many of them – both the new and older units – had recurring issues.
“But you know, with the Swident Partner, it just doesn’t ever seem to have too much going wrong.”
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