I Got Tired of Being a Hygienist Squeezed Between Other People’s Schedules. So I Built a Practice Where Hygiene Is the Schedule.

I’m Olivia. I’m a registered dental hygienist, I’ve been cleaning teeth for years, and a few years ago I made a decision that surprised most of the people I know in dentistry.

I built a practice with no dentist on staff.

That’s not a typo. Practice 32 is a dental hygiene-only practice in Colorado Springs. We don’t do fillings. We don’t do crowns. We don’t do extractions or root canals. We do dental hygiene, and we do it the way I always wanted to do it back when I was working in someone else’s column.

If you’re a hygienist reading this, you probably have one of two reactions.

The first is “wait, that’s allowed?” Yes. In Colorado, registered dental hygienists can operate independently within their scope of practice. It has been legal for years. It is still rare, because building a practice is hard, and most hygienists never get told it’s an option. (I’m telling you. It’s an option.)

The second reaction is the one I had for years before I finally did something about it: “What would that even feel like?”

I’ll tell you. But first I want to talk about why I’m writing this.

Why I’m writing this

I’ve been asked some version of “wait, what does hygiene-only mean?” enough times that a blog post saves us all some explanation. That’s the obvious reason.

The honest reason is: we’re hiring, and the kind of hygienist who would thrive at Practice 32 doesn’t read a job posting and apply. They read a job posting and feel cynical about every “great culture” claim they’ve ever seen. They’ve been burned. They’ve been promised growth opportunities that turned out to be unpaid overtime. They’ve been told they’re “part of the family” while being scheduled in 12-minute slots back-to-back-to-back with no real lunch break.

So this isn’t a job posting. It’s a longer thing. I’m trying to tell you what we are and what we aren’t, so you can decide whether you want to come look at us. The job posting and careers page exist if you want the bullet-point version. This is the version where I actually try to tell you what it feels like to work here.

What being a hygienist felt like before I built this

I trained as a hygienist because I wanted to work in prevention and because I liked people. The job is partly clinical and partly relational. You’re scaling and probing and educating, yes, but you’re also building a years-long relationship with someone, helping them understand their own mouth, noticing the things that change between visits.

I worked in general practice for years before I built Practice 32. I worked at offices that were genuinely lovely, run by genuinely kind dentists. I worked at offices that weren’t. I had patients I loved. I had moments where the work felt exactly right.

I also had:

• Days where my column ran an hour late because the doctor’s column was running long and I was waiting on his exams.
• Conversations with patients that got cut to 90 seconds because the schedule was a hostage situation.
• A nagging sense that even at the best practices, hygiene was being shoehorned into a schedule built for someone else.
• The feeling of being introduced to new patients as “just the hygienist” by people who meant well but didn’t know what hygienists actually do.
• Months where the comp was “fine” but I knew that if I weren’t there, the practice’s hygiene revenue would collapse, and I wondered why “fine” was the ceiling.
• Burnout. Specifically the kind of burnout where you still love the patients but you start to dread the schedule.

If any of that is familiar, you’re the person I’m writing to.

What hygiene-only actually means

Practice 32 does dental hygiene services and only dental hygiene services. Prophylactic cleanings. Periodontal therapy. Fluoride and sealant treatments. Oral cancer screenings. X-rays as needed. Patient education. We work within our licensure as registered dental hygienists.

We do not do fillings. We do not do crowns. We do not do extractions or root canals. When patients need restorative or surgical care, we refer to dentists whose work we trust.

This is not a limitation. It is a focus. The whole practice is built around hygiene, which means the schedule is built around hygiene, the operatory is set up for hygiene, the team is hygienists, and the question we ask every Monday morning is “how do we do better hygiene this week?”

Some implications, in plain English:

• Single-column. You have your own column, your own patients, your own schedule. You don’t wait on a doctor’s exams. You don’t get pulled into someone else’s column when their case runs long. Your day is yours.
• No assistant handoffs. Hygienists at Practice 32 own the whole appointment. Setup, the appointment itself, breakdown, sterilization. Some hygienists love this. Some find it different than what they’re used to. We’re transparent about it.
• Time you actually have. Our appointments are scheduled to do hygiene properly, not to fit around restorative cases. That means you can spend an extra five minutes explaining what you’re seeing on a patient’s X-ray. That means probing depths get done thoroughly, not quickly.
• Patients who come back to you. Patients see the same hygienist visit after visit, year after year. You build a real relationship. They notice when you’re not there.

Pay, in plain numbers

I’m putting this up high in the post because I respect your time and I know it matters.

Each month at Practice 32, your paycheck is the higher of two numbers:

• $53 per hour times your hours, OR
• 30 percent of your monthly production

$53 per hour is the guaranteed floor. In practice, every hygienist on our team has always landed above the floor. The only month anyone sat at the floor was a single first-month ramp-up while they were learning our systems. After that, production has carried every hygienist higher every single month, every hygienist, no exceptions.

If you’ve worked in practices where comp is structured as “$X per hour OR Y percent of production whichever is higher,” and that wording set off your alarm bells because it reads as variance, I get it. The wording is unfortunate. The reality at Practice 32 is that the floor is the floor, the production formula is the upside, and the upside is real and consistent.

A few honest things about this:

• No sign-on bonus. Some practices in town offer them. We chose to put that money into the floor and the schedule instead. If you’d rather have $5,000 up front and a $50 per hour floor elsewhere, those practices exist. We’re not competing on cash up-front; we’re competing on what your day-to-day actually feels like and what you take home over a year.
• Production-based comp doesn’t punish you. If you have a slow month, you make the floor. If you have a great month, you make the production percentage. There’s no draw, no clawback, no penalty for slow months that gets recouped from later checks.
• You’ll see the math. On your working interview, I’ll show you a current hygienist’s actual pay history (anonymized, with their permission). You don’t have to take my word for it.

What a Tuesday looks like

I’m going to try to describe a Tuesday at Practice 32, because every “great culture” claim sounds the same and you deserve specifics.

You arrive. There’s coffee. There’s a couple of hygienists already in the operatory setting up. Whoever is at the front desk says hi. The schedule is on the wall, posted last week, no surprises. Your first patient is someone you’ve seen three times before. You know their kids’ names. You know which side they prefer for X-rays.

You see your patients on time, because there is no other column to wait on. You take the time you need on each one. You catch something on a perio probing that you mention to the patient and write up for our records, and at lunch you grab the team for 90 seconds to talk through the case because we share clinical notes that way.

At lunch, somebody on the team makes a joke. Somebody else laughs. The front desk person tells us about her dog. We eat. We go back.

The afternoon is more of the same. You finish your last patient. You break down the room. You leave. You’re not “off late,” because there is no off late. The work was the work.

You drive home. You’re tired in the good way. You’re not dreading tomorrow.

That’s it. That’s the pitch.

A few things that won’t be true at Practice 32

• We won’t tell you that you’re “part of the family.” You’re a clinician. We respect you for it.
• We won’t promise growth opportunities that turn out to be unpaid extra duties.
• We won’t schedule you in 30-minute slots and pretend that’s “doing hygiene right.”
• We won’t make you sell whitening or memberships or upsells. If a patient needs something, we’ll tell them. If they don’t, we won’t.
• We won’t ghost you in the hiring process. You’ll have a yes/no within a week.
• We won’t pretend the working interview is theater. It’s the real schedule with real patients. If we offer you the role afterward, it’s because we watched you work.

What we need from you

• Active Colorado RDH license.
• Laser certification (required, hygiene-only means we own the whole workup).
• Local anesthesia certification (same reason).
• 1+ years of clinical experience preferred. New grads with the certs above, please apply anyway. Half the great hygienists I know got hired into their first job by someone who took a chance.
• Comfort in a clinician-led practice, or curiosity to try.

Why I really wrote this

Because hygienists are some of the most skilled, undervalued clinicians in healthcare, and most of you are working at offices that don’t fully understand what you do.

I wanted to build the alternative. I have. I want to share it with one more hygienist who’s tired of the column-switching, the production pressure dressed up as “practice growth,” the patients you don’t get to know.

If that’s you, come look at us. We’re hiring one full-time RDH right now.

See the open role and apply at our careers page.

Or DM me directly on Facebook with a quick intro.

You can also schedule as a patient if you found this post by searching for a dental hygiene practice in Colorado Springs. We’d love to see you.

Practice 32 is hygiene-only because hygiene done right deserves its own practice. That’s the whole reason I started it.

– Olivia, Owner & RDH, Practice 32