How a Non-Dentist Turned Failing Dental Practices Around

Rebecca Ding never planned to work in dentistry. Her background is in literature, and it was her husband's dream to own a practice. When he and a business partner bought their first site and it had no practice manager, she stepped in to order scrubs and do the rotas, then quickly found the job was far bigger than she expected.

When several practices came on the market at once, the owners took on three of them a month apart, and Wooding Dental Group was born. She has kept promoting herself since and now calls herself chief operating officer.

As a non-clinician she first arrived as the owner's wife, and some staff tried to tell her things had to be done a certain way when they didn't. Her answer was to draw a clear line: she stays out of clinical decisions, but as an owner she sets how the business runs and backs her changes with results.

Because the group has mostly taken on failing practices, she asks teams to try a new way and talk about it afterwards. Change is now so normal that people who can't live with it tend to leave. By her account, the main site has grown from five surgeries and five team members to nearly 11 surgeries and about 58 people.

Her remit covers everything outside finance and clinical work: policies, processes, procedures and decisions on new software. The aim is consistency across four practices without losing each one's personality, patient base and manager.

The group stays dentist-led, and she stopped managing the dentists directly after finding it caused more friction than it solved. Jared shares a line from Coherent's own onboarding, show me the SOPs and we'll show you the problems, and Rebecca agrees. If expectations were never written down, she takes the blame herself, asks what went well, and writes it up.

Rebecca separates the clinical side, which is black and white because it is about patient safety, from everything outside the surgery, which is a grey zone.

The group's ethos is family-led, and she argues that adding a regional manager doesn't make four practices a corporate, even if staff who lived through failed previous owners worry it does. Reception teams get scripts but the freedom to adapt them, because they know their patients and see them in the supermarket.

She also talks openly about the guilt of leaving for the school run while the team works until quarter past five, and about growing a thicker skin.

Asked how she knows the group is doing well, she points to doors that are still open after taking on failing practices, membership plans that weren't there before, and teams that have doubled or tripled.

She describes two kinds of turnaround: small fixes, such as finally hiring the extra nurse a manager had been requesting for years, and a full culture rebuild at one site where someone handed in their notice every month. Her real measure is atmosphere, the feel of a practice when you walk in.

On AI, she welcomes tools such as an AI receptionist that give her reception team better information before they call a patient back, because patients will always see a human dentist in the end.

Looking ahead, she wants stability for her teams and a busy training academy, and would prefer to keep growing in Wales. Her biggest concern is the new NHS dental contract in Wales, which in her account replaced units of dental activity with care packages from April, and which she says is confusing for teams and patients alike.

She invited the Chief Dental Officer for Wales to the academy launch to make that case. Her advice to newcomers is to write down expectations and procedures, try things, know your limits without bluffing, and keep revisiting every process, because unlike clinical skill, operations can be rebuilt overnight.