Pediatric surgical dental assistant
Full-time, on site. 6:30 a.m. to about 3:00 p.m. No call, no weekends.
Independence Surgery Center is a new ambulatory surgery center in Independence, Missouri, owned and funded by the doctors who operate in it. No private equity. No hospital system. No DSO. When something needs to change here, you talk to the owners.
We are hiring the assistants who will open it.
Why this place exists
Kids on Medicaid and kids with special needs who cannot be treated in a dental chair wait months for an OR. Some of them are walking around with infections while they wait. Most practices refer those cases out and forget about them.
We built the OR instead. That is not a side program here. It is the schedule.
The role
You assist a pediatric dentist on every case in an operating room: room and instrument setup, instrument handling, intraoperative monitoring, recovery, discharge.
Every patient is under general anesthesia. No behavior management, no tell-show-do, no parent in the room. Your attention stays on the case.
What is different about working here
You will not sterilize instruments or clean rooms. Separate sterile techs do that. Your hands are for assisting.
And you are not walking into somebody else's system. We open late October, early November. How the trays get set, how the room flows, how we hand off to recovery, that gets decided in the first few months by the people doing it.
What you need
Dental assisting experience. You do not need OR experience.
You need to want to be in a surgical room. Sedated kids, an open field, a doctor working fast. If that sounds like the wrong kind of day, this is the wrong job.
What we train
The surgery center environment, intraoperative monitoring, scrub and instrument handling for our cases, our recovery and discharge process.
Is this real yet?
Fair question if you are thinking about leaving a stable job. The building is in construction. Licensure and accreditation are in process. Opening is set for late October, early November.
Applying
Three questions come with the application. They take a few minutes and there are no trick answers. We read every one ourselves, because a resume does not tell us what we actually want to know.
Pay: $23.00 - $28.00 per hour
Benefits:
- 401(k) matching
- Dental insurance
- Health insurance
- Life insurance
Application Question(s):
- Go to www.independencesc.com and read about why this center was built. In your own words, who are we here for, and why does that matter to you specifically?
- Tell us about a day at work that went badly. Not a conflict with a coworker, an actual bad day clinically or operationally. What happened, what did you do, and what would you do differently?
- This job is the same procedure, on a sedated child, on repeat, all day. Why is that appealing to you rather than boring?
Work Location: In person
