Since dull instruments can harm both the patient and dental hygienist, a preferred choice is sharpening. Yet constant sharpening—or even periodic sharpening—can come at a high price. Here’s a detailed look at just how much sharpening can cost you.
The More Obvious Hidden Costs of Sharpening
Investing in instruments is expensive—and so is maintaining them. Many dental hygienists try to save money with more cost-effective options like stainless steel instruments, but they actually cost more in the long run since the material wears down quickly. The cost of instruments is not only the purchase price but also the cost of staff time, maintenance and early replacement with poor sharpening skills.
Time Lost; Money Lost
Sharpening one instrument takes only a few minutes. However, 66% of dental hygienists work with eight or more instrument kits, meaning it takes a lot more than just a few minutes to keep them all sharp.
Keeping your instruments in top working condition is essential to excellent patient care—but so is spending time with patients. As much as you love your job, you still need to make a profit. And time away from patients means money lost.
Think about it like this. The average adult dental appointment costs around $200. If you spend an hour a week sharpening your instruments, you could lose $200. Stretch that out over a year, and that equals $10,400 of potential revenue lost.
Paying for a Sharpening Service
Understandably, many dental hygienists prefer spending time with their patients (and earning money), not sharpening their instruments. And if they have a full schedule—which, let’s be honest, happens a lot—they don’t have the time to stop and resharpen.
That’s why many clinicians choose a sharpening service. However, while this option helps save time, it can still cost you more than expected.
Subscription Plans
Let’s say you sign up with a sharpening service company that advertises a yearly membership fee that’s only a few hundred dollars. That seems like less money than you would lose sharpening the instruments yourself, but there are other things to consider.
First, these cheaper plans often cover a very limited number of instruments per year, typically around 50. Since most dental hygienists work with at least eight kits, each with several instruments, the limit of 50 per year wouldn’t even cover one sharpening for each instrument.
To ensure routine sharpening for all your instruments, you would have to invest in a subscription plan with a much higher limit. There are options that go up to 500 instruments per year, but those cost around $2,000. You would likely need double or triple the number of kits to cycle through the sharpening service and ensure you have enough available for your workload.
Pay-as-You-Go Plans
Other companies charge per instrument. Their prices can range between $1 and $10 per end, depending on the instrument type. Then add the shipping expenses, which can be $10-20. So let’s say your clinic needs to send 30 instruments at $5 each. That’s $150 to sharpen one end of these instruments, plus an extra $10 in shipping.
Since you need to sharpen your instruments every 15-45 strokes, you might schedule a sharpening rotation every week. That would mean at least $160 each week, or well over $8,000 annually.
On top of that, you need to consider the time spent waiting for these instruments to ship. Even if the sharpening service immediately sharpens them upon arrival, you still need to wait a few days to receive the package. And with this shipping rotation, you have some added responsibilities of tracking inventory, which can also take time away from your patient care.
The Not-So-Obvious Hidden Costs of Sharpening
Of course, not all sharpening costs are financial. You also need to consider the physical and social tolls involved.
Dental hygienists typically spend very little time in school learning to sharpen their instruments properly. As a result, about two-thirds of dental hygienists don’t feel very confident in their sharpening skills – yet 83% still sharpen their instruments manually.
Since sharpening requires precise techniques, any wrong move could remove too much material and reshape the tip. And an incorrect angle or weakened tip can come with steep costs for you, your patients, and ultimately, your clinic.
Discomfort for Dental Hygienists
Dental hygiene instruments are designed to be as ergonomic as possible. If you accidentally reshape the tip when sharpening, those ergonomic features are lost, and the instrument can no longer perform as it should. You then have to adjust your technique to accommodate the new contour or angle tip.
You might need to apply more force, change your posture or hold your wrist at an awkward angle. While seemingly slight adjustments, they can have a serious effect on your well-being. In fact, 91% of dental hygienists have experienced a musculoskeletal disorder, likely resulting from working with improperly sharpened or dull instruments.
Injured Patients
Instrument sharpness is essential to quality patient care. But sharpening even a little too much can render the tools ineffective, making them just as dangerous to the patient as dull ones.
If a dental hygienist has to exert more force when cleaning to accommodate the new tip shape, they can easily slip and hurt the patient’s gums. Plus, an ineffective tool—even a sharp one—requires more strokes to work properly. That can be uncomfortable or even painful for the patient, and you risk leaving grooves on their teeth.
Oversharpening instruments can also weaken their tips, making them more prone to breakage—especially if you are already applying excessive force to improve their effectiveness. If a tip breaks off in a patient’s mouth, it can cause serious damage.
Damaged Reputation
Quality patient care is the key to a successful dental hygiene career. That’s why you sharpen your instruments—to provide a smooth, pain-free experience for your patients. However, sharpening can have the opposite effect.
As mentioned above, oversharpening can result in an uncomfortable and painful experience. Patients might begin to look for another practice and recommend someone else to their families and friends. This could harm a clinician’s reputation as a dental hygienist and lower the practice’s revenue, both things they tried to avoid by keeping the instruments sharp.
Save Money Without Risking Your—or Your Patients’—Safety
Sharpening dental instruments can cost you much more than expected—and not just financially. However, the answer is not to stop sharpening, since that can be equally harmful to your patients, your muscles and your practice.
A better option is to invest in wear-resistant instruments that don’t require such constant sharpening. For example, XP® Sharpen-Free Instruments last just as long—if not longer—than stainless steel instruments. And the best part is they require zero sharpening.
With high-quality instruments like these, you don’t have to choose between saving money and offering quality patient care. You can work efficiently and safely while also increasing your return on investment.
