On 23rd November 2018 members of staff from The Campbell Clinic collected a dental award, on the same day that many other dental awards were handed out.
The award they received was the research poster prize at the British Dental Hygienist Conference in Liverpool.
It was not a glitzy, boozy, black tie, table dinner award ceremony, but was at a conference of dental professionals and they presented research from primary care.
It wasn’t available on social media to view and you couldn’t find a picture of them stood with the award in their hands (at least I couldn’t) but it was a very special award.
It doesn’t demonstrate that we are ‘the best practice in East Nottinghamshire’ it doesn’t demonstrate that we have ‘the best dental team on Loughborough Road in West Bridgford’
We didn’t self-nominate for this and buy a table at the ceremony, we produced something which makes an extraordinary difference to clinical outcomes in patients and will do for years to come.
It’s a very simple concept but the best concepts are always the simple ones.
We demonstrated from a service evaluation in our own practice that the instigation of a structured hygiene maintenance programme and hygiene education prior to implant treatment improves outcomes. This is from a primary dental care setting.
This might seem simple and intuitive and something that we should all do, but it isn’t and we don’t. We should, but still we don’t.
Greater than this, it encourages people to reattend for maintenance following the provision of complex dental treatment, which in turn may well have a significant impact on their general health.
Further to this it allows people to be confident in providing long term guarantees for the treatment they provide, therefore increasing the quality of standard across the industry.
These seem small matters when all that seems to be important in dentistry at the moment is which piece of ludicrously expensive high-tech kit (that has no or little research backing behind it) should you have in your practice.
We have been, in our little organisation, quite at the cutting edge of digital dentistry and I believe we still are in many ways but we have rarely done anything more important than this.
This is about health…this is about quality of treatment… this is about longevity and it’s proven to work.
This forms the basis (from a very clever business perspective) of a 10-year guarantee of implant restorations in practice.
I believe that this should become the ‘minimum standard’ for guarantees in dental practice going forwards.
It would have been quite straightforward for me to put us forward for various other dental awards which would have been collected on the 23rdNovember and I’m confident we could have secured at least an award that said we were a finalist.
I’d rather take this one.
Huge recognition to be given to Karen Walker, our senior hygienist at the practice who ran all of this research and collected the data but at least as much kudos should go to Anna Walker, who presented the poster presentation and got many compliments for the way she conducted herself, even though she is ‘just a dental nurse’
I would take that award of the ‘other’ awards any day of the week.
Blog Post Number: 1842
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