Thursday Troubleshooter: Dental team not entirely on board with unique scheduling solutions

QUESTION: I’m a hygienist in a multi-disciplinary dental office. My question is how to handle conflict with the front desk about keeping the hygiene schedule fully booked. We have eight full-or part-time RDHs. Five front desk patient coordinators are responsible for the schedule. Each coordinator is responsible for one or two hygienist’s schedules. If the person who has been assigned to a schedule is out, the schedule is not being filled. We work on commission, so if we do not have patients, we do not get paid. The office manager says that if your front office person is out, everyone at the front is responsible for filling the schedule. But this is not happening.The problem is, after working as a clinician for eight hours, we’re now being asked to stay late to fill our schedule so that the front desk can go home because, “We’ve tried all day and haven’t been able to fill it.” When they do fill it, they place a perio-maintenance patient in a 40-minute child prophy spot and say, “Well, at least the schedule is full, right?”

We’ve even been asked to shadow the front desk people and vice versa so that we can understand what each of us brings to the practice. The office manager was all for this, IF we would come in on our day off and shadow the front desk. But since they’re short one person at the front and they all work five days a week, they could not shadow us. How can we address this with the front desk team without coming off as “the prima donna hygiene team”?