Supporting Surrey's growing practices.
Surrey has grown faster than anywhere else in the region, and its practices have grown with it. Scale changes what a laboratory relationship needs to do, usually before anyone notices.
Growth causes divergence, not volume problems
Laboratories handle volume routinely. What they handle less well is a practice where several clinicians each prepare slightly differently, prescribe differently, like contacts at a different tightness, and give feedback inconsistently or not at all.
The laboratory ends up calibrating to an average that suits nobody in particular, and every clinician independently concludes that the laboratory is inconsistent.
This is the characteristic problem of a growing practice, and it is fixable. Working with a laboratory as a practice grows sets out the approach in detail.
Standardize the parts that need not vary
One prescription format across the practice. One shade guide, named on every case. One protocol for photographing anterior work. One packing and labelling routine. One named contact for laboratory queries.
None of that constrains clinical judgement, and together it removes the noise that makes genuine differences between clinicians hard to see.
The individual preferences that do matter — materials, contact tightness, how much occlusal contact is wanted at delivery — are then worth recording explicitly per clinician, so the laboratory can build to each rather than to an average.
Associates and continuity
Associate turnover restarts calibration each time. A practice that has documented its laboratory arrangements can bring a new clinician up to speed in an hour; one that has not will find the new associate's cases behave differently for months and will probably attribute it to the laboratory.
Telling the laboratory when a new clinician joins helps too. A technician who knows a prescriber is new will query a borderline case rather than assume.
Case mix broadens as practices grow
Practices that grow commercially tend to broaden clinically at the same time — adding implant restorative work, retaining cases that would previously have been referred, and treating patients they would once have sent elsewhere.
That progression usually outpaces the laboratory conversation. A practice that chose its laboratory on routine crown and bridge work may be sending full-arch implant cases two years later without ever having discussed whether the arrangement still fits.
Revisit it as scope changes rather than only when something goes wrong.
Multi-site groups
Groups operating from several locations face the divergence problem at a larger scale. Each site develops its own conventions, and the group ends up with several laboratory relationships none of which is properly calibrated.
Consolidating restorative work and standardizing across sites is usually the right answer, but it needs doing deliberately: one format, one shade guide, one photography protocol, one escalation path, and per-clinician profiles that travel with the clinician rather than the location.
Be explicit about who at group level owns the relationship. Where nobody does, decisions get made site by site and the consistency benefit of scale is lost.
Remake economics change with scale
In a single-operatory practice a remake is an irritation. In a busy multi-operatory clinic it is a scheduling problem that ripples, because the chair time needed to reseat displaces an appointment already booked.
That shifts the laboratory selection calculation. A few dollars per unit is trivial against the cost of additional appointments across several hundred cases a year, and consistency becomes the dominant criterion rather than one of several.
Scale also makes tracking worthwhile. A practice at volume generates enough cases for patterns to become meaningful within months rather than years — record only the category of each remake and the cause usually identifies itself.
Practical arrangements at volume
With twenty cases out rather than three, tracking matters. The single most useful habit is somebody at the practice owning it — a named person who knows what is out, what is due and what needs chasing.
Cases move by UPS and Purolator, and Fairmont works with practices throughout British Columbia and across Canada. Discuss arrangements explicitly as volume grows rather than assuming what worked at five cases a week will work at thirty.
A practice in Surrey
Fairmont consistently delivers restorations that fit well, look natural and arrive when promised. Their technicians are responsive, easy to reach and always willing to discuss complex cases. That reliability allows our clinical team to treat patients with confidence.