Between Patients is an invitation-only podcast for private dental practice owners. We hand-select a small circle of guests each season, around 12 per run, and we read every application personally. This post explains what we are actually looking for, so a practice owner thinking about applying can see whether the fit is there before they spend three minutes on the form.
There are three criteria. They are simple to write down and harder to interview against. We will take each one in turn.
Three things every selected guest has in common
Every guest who has earned a seat on Between Patients has shared three things. We did not start with this list. We arrived at it after looking at what made the conversations we wanted to record actually work.
The first is a story worth telling. Not a sales story. Not a brand story. An operational story with specifics in it. The second is the willingness to be honest on tape about the parts that are not pretty. The third is a practice that has built something specific and teachable. None of the three on its own is enough. All three together is the bar.
What follows is each criterion in plain language, with the kind of practice owner each one tends to surface. None of the examples below is a quote from a guest. Season One is still recording, and we will not pretend we have run more episodes than we have. The examples are categories, drawn from the conversations practice owners actually compare notes on at study clubs, on courses, and on the phone late at night.
Owners with a story worth telling
There is a difference between a story and a CV. A CV lists where you trained and what you do. A story is the specific decision you made when the easy option was clearly wrong, and the messy outcome you got, and the thing you learned that you would not have learned by playing safe.
The owners who tend to fit this criterion fall into a few rough shapes. There is the owner who took the practice over from a parent and had to rebuild the patient base after the handover. There is the associate who decided to stop being an associate and opened a private practice from scratch, in a postcode the consultants would have warned them against. There is the owner who ran a small NHS-mixed list through the pandemic and came out the other side as a wholly private practice. There is the owner who carved out a niche the textbooks did not cover, in implants, in sleep, in TMD, and built a referral network around it.
None of those shapes is rare in dentistry. What is rare is hearing the story honestly. The textbooks do not cover the decision to drop a long-time associate who was undermining the rota. The CPD courses do not cover the call where you told an existing patient base that the practice was going fully private. The trade press does not cover the year you cleared £40,000 in personal debt by sleeping in a back room. Those are stories worth telling. We want those.
If you have been through any of the above, your application is worth sending. We covered the wider remit of the show in our overview of why we built Between Patients, and you can see what an episode actually looks like in our deliverables breakdown.
People willing to be honest on tape
Honesty is the criterion that disqualifies the most applications. Not because applicants are dishonest. Because the version of yourself that comes out when a microphone is on tends to drift toward PR.
The instinct is understandable. You are running a business that depends on its reputation, and you have spent years training yourself to give the polished answer. The problem is that the polished answer is the answer everyone has already heard. The operational reality, including the hard parts, is the answer practice owners actually want to compare notes on.
So when we say honest on tape, what we mean is that the unsaid parts are allowed to come up. The decision you regretted. The hire that did not work out. The capex on the new chair that took twice as long to pay back as you expected. The year your diary was full and your bank balance still ended in a minus. The patient who walked out because you priced something correctly.
We do not film a gotcha show. We do not push for the hard parts. We simply do not flinch when they come up. If the unsaid parts are part of the answer, we treat them like part of the answer.
There is editorial control built into the format to make this safer. You see the edit before publication. Anything you do not want in the final cut gets cut. No questions, no negotiation. The honesty we are looking for is not the honesty of someone who has agreed to be vulnerable in public. It is the honesty of someone who is comfortable with the specifics of what they actually do, and is willing to describe them straight.
The trailer for the show runs 43 seconds and gives you a sense of the tone. You can hear it on the Between Patients landing page. If the tone reads as familiar to you, that is a signal.
Practices we can learn from
You do not need to be a household name to be a great guest on Between Patients. Some of the most useful conversations we want to record are with owners whose names nobody outside their immediate region would recognise. What you do need is to have built something specific that another practice owner could learn from.
The word specific is doing the work in that sentence. Generic principles do not travel. Specific examples do. If you have built a referral pipeline that brings in 30 new private patients a quarter from one referrer, that is teachable. If you have a training programme inside the practice that takes a graduate from associate to associate-with-list in 18 months, that is teachable. If you have a recall system that has taken your hygiene-attendance rate from 60% to 85%, that is teachable.
Specificity is not about being clever. It is about being concrete. A guest who can describe exactly how they made a thing work, including the parts where it did not work the first three times, gives the listener something they can actually use. That is the bar.
If you have something specific, the field you are in does not matter much. We are interested in the orthodontics-only practice, in the family practice with the strong NHS history, in the implant centre, in the rural single-chair practice that did £900,000 of fees last year. The teachable specificity is the thing we are looking for. The brand is not.
Why we hand-select a small circle each season
A larger show would be a different show. The choice to keep the circle small each season is deliberate. Around 12 episodes a season is enough to get a real range of practice owners on the record. It is small enough that we can read every application personally, respond to every application personally, and pick guests on the basis of fit rather than volume.
The cost of this choice is that we say no to more applications than we say yes to. We are clear about that. If your application does not land in this season, it does not mean your story was not worth telling. It usually means the slot we were trying to fill at that point was a different shape. We will tell you that, briefly, when we reply. We respond to every application.
The benefit of the choice is that the editorial standard stays high. The show is not a vehicle for selling sponsorships. There is no fee, no sales pitch, and no agenda built in. The producer is SelenicAI, which makes voice receptionists for dental practices, but the editorial decision about whether a story belongs in a season is separate from any commercial relationship. You can read more about the show's origin and lineage in our post on four generations of dentistry.
If you read the three criteria above and recognised your practice in any of them, the application is on the landing page. It is three short steps, around three minutes to complete. We will respond within 48 hours either way.
By invitation, no fee, no agenda. The door is open.
A short closing note on what we will not ask you for
It might be useful to be explicit about what we will not ask of you, since some practice owners hesitate to apply because they assume there is a hidden ask underneath. There is not. We will not ask you to pay anything to be on the show. We will not ask you to sign up for SelenicAI as a customer. We will not ask you to share patient data or anything covered by GDPR. We will not ask you to commit to follow-up content beyond the one episode. We will not ask you to promote the show on your own channels, although you are welcome to. The episode is a single thirty-minute conversation. The asset pack is yours afterwards. That is the whole arrangement.
