I’ve been teaching new dental graduates in their organised scheme in the first year from qualification since 1998.
That means that this would be my 25th year although it was interrupted for a short while after I was ‘fired’ when I quickly left the practice which has been sold to MyDentist and was viewed as having let people down.
Over the past few years and with great thanks to my friend, Jason Wong, who has reintroduced me to this world, I’ve been able to put on days and half-days for some of the DFT’s (dental foundation trainees) which used to be known in my day as VT’s (vocational trainees) as an introduction to implant dentistry but also just as an introduction to dentistry.
Over the past few years in pandemic world, we’ve been able to do these virtually and then in our own teaching facility at The Campbell Academy.
Our most recent one of these days was last Thursday.
Generally, I have looked after groups from the Trent region which spans from about Chesterfield all the way down to Northampton now, but I’ve also done this around the country in different places.
At the start of the 2000’s as I was teaching sometimes 4 or 5 groups a year, I realised that there was a huge insignificant shift towards a focus on ‘how much can I make’ as a dentist.
I was getting more and more frustrated and disillusioned stood in front of groups of VT’s and DFT’s who just kept shouting ‘show me the money’.
And so, I developed a game that I would use when I spoke to new and young graduates which I call the Icarus income game. This game works like this:
- Offer the group a salary for the rest of their life
- Index link the salary
- Attach a gold-plated pension to the salary
- Up to six weeks holiday per year
- Autonomy, development, extraordinary job satisfaction
- Understand that if you ask for too high a salary you’ll get nothing (this is the Icarus bit).
So, once you’ve set the game up you usually ask the group to write down secretly on a piece of paper how much money they would take.
This is a salary starting now for the rest of your life, protected, which would be index linked going forwards.
This is the circumstance in which new graduates find themselves in.
They are now in demand as the number of dentists in the UK continues to fall and they’re in a position where they can believe that their job will be entirely secure for the rest of their career.
That’s a nice position to be in for someone and certainly not the position that many people currently find themselves in.
And so, with this game, the format for which has been running for almost 20 years, I hit the middle of the noughties and one group in particular which made me sit back and think very hard.
In this one particular session, the average on the piece of paper written down by these new graduates (who were mostly 23 years old and just out of university) was £250,000.
Remember that this was in 2005 or there abouts.
At that stage I felt that we had no hope because the people who’d entered dental school in around 1999 had done so thinking that this was the career that they were in for and they were about to be hugely disappointed (or enormously unethical in their practice).
It’s worth remembering that these individuals are now 17 years on and many of them you can pick out quite clearly among the profession.
So, last week we did the game again.
Very similar sample group. Similar region. Actually, the exact same scheme from which the infamous group from 2005 had been part of.
The average this time was £65,000.
So, this is a significant sum of money for a protected job where there is almost no risk, but it is enormously more realistic than the £250,000 from 2005.
And so, it seems by this measure (and the sample size is far too small and it’s not scientific) that the expectations of new graduates is now much more coming into line with what is expectable and reasonable and perhaps, just possibly, dentistry is changing.
Some of these guys will go on to have their own business and to change dentistry and to make it much better and to be inspirational leaders within the profession and will reap greater rewards both financially and personally and psychologically and some of them just want a steady career where they look after people to the best of their ability, gaining the satisfaction of long-term care and being a healthcare professional.
It is though, a wonderful ray of sunshine set against some of the utter nonsense that you see published in the most terrible of places.
Blog Post Number - 3113
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