September Staffing Checklist for Dental Practice Managers

Every practice manager knows the feeling of September arriving faster than the rota planning did. School terms restart, the phones pick up, and the quieter pace of August is suddenly a memory. The practices that come through the month smoothly aren't the ones who avoid the rush - nobody does - they're the ones who spent twenty minutes in late August getting ahead of it.

This is a working checklist for that twenty minutes: what to look at, in what order, before the surge actually hits.

1. Check your known gaps first

Start with what you already know. Look at the rota for the next four to six weeks and flag anything already confirmed: staff holidays, training days, appointments your own team have booked, anything that's a certainty rather than a risk.

These are the easiest gaps to plan for, because there's no uncertainty about whether they'll happen - only about who covers them. If you haven't already posted shifts for these dates, that's the first thing worth doing, because posting early gives you first pick of who's available rather than whoever's left once every other practice starts doing the same thing. Why timing matters this month goes into this in more detail if you want the reasoning behind it.

2. Estimate where the demand pressure will land hardest

Not every week in September carries equal weight. The first two weeks, when term-time bookings surge hardest, are usually where the diary tightens fastest - particularly for family and child appointments. If you can, look at last September's booking pattern for a rough guide to this year's.

Knowing which weeks will be tightest lets you prioritise where planned cover matters most, rather than treating the whole month as equally urgent.

3. Make sure your account is actually ready to post

If your practice hasn't used a direct-booking platform before, or your account has sat unused since it was set up, this is worth five minutes now rather than during an actual gap. Registration is free and takes a few minutes; if you're already registered, check that your payment details and practice information are current so a shift can go out the moment you need one.

There's no cost to having an account ready and unused - the only cost is not having it ready when you do need it.

4. Build a short list of locums you trust

If you've booked cover before, you'll likely have worked with locums whose profiles, ratings, or reliability stood out. Many practices build informal relationships with locums they've used more than once, which tends to make each subsequent booking faster and smoother, since the locum already knows the practice.

If you're booking for the first time, GDC verification and visible ratings mean you don't need an existing relationship to book with confidence - but a short list of names you'd happily book again is still worth keeping for future reference.

5. Know what to do if a gap opens with no notice

Planning covers the gaps you can see coming. Not every gap is visible in advance - a sick day is a sick day regardless of the calendar. For those, the process should be identical whether it's September or any other month: post the shift with as few restrictions as possible (role, date, location), and let the request reach the widest possible pool of matching verified locums. 60% of shifts fill in under 5 minutes.

"I could not be more happy with Airlocum. I needed a locum at incredibly short notice and they went out of their way to help me find one at half 6 in the morning. These guys blow the other locum services out of the water." - Jack Button, Clinical Director, South Kensington Medical and Dental

6. Don't over-restrict your requests

It's tempting to add filters - a tight budget, a narrow radius, a specific locum only - but every restriction narrows the pool your request reaches, and reach is what determines how fast a shift fills. For genuinely urgent gaps especially, it's worth keeping requirements to what's actually necessary (clinical qualifications) rather than preferences that can wait for a calmer month. 

The one exception is a favourites request: with My Favourites First, your request goes to your favourited locums first and opens to the wider pool automatically after 15 minutes - preference without sacrificing reach.

7. Revisit the plan mid-month

A September plan made in late August won't perfectly predict the month. Checking back in around week two - once you can see how the surge is actually landing - lets you adjust for whichever weeks turn out busier than expected, rather than working from a guess made before the month started.

The short version

None of this requires new systems or a big time investment - it's mostly about doing in late August what most practices end up doing reactively in mid-September anyway: identifying gaps, posting for them, and having an account ready to go. The only real difference is timing, and timing is the one thing entirely within a practice's control.

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