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To understand acts of commission is quite easy.

If you see someone do something terrible and you blame them because the outcome is awful and everyone understands.

Acts of omission, otherwise known as wilful blindness, are altogether different.

An act of omission is to turn your back on the something terrible, or to convince yourself that it’s not your business, or to fail to act when the terrible thing is happening

‘Bad things happen when good men do nothing’

Acts of omission and wilful blindness occur on individual, local, professional and population levels. There is some extraordinary psychological research which underpins why so many of the German army were happy to participate in the atrocities in the Second World War.

There is a percentage of the population in which it seems it’s hard wired to accept wilful blindness.

As we develop and as we move on and try to get better, we must examine our own intendency towards wilful blindness and the things we’re prepared to allow to continue because they’re simply not convenient to our lives.

We must foster a feeling amongst our children where they have responsibility to society overall and cast off this insistence that the individual is more important than the whole.

I’ve had the opportunity to have conversations with some very clever people in the last little while about what happened to dentistry since I qualified in 1994 and what, in large parts, it has become.

It’s easy to point the finger at a few people (and I often do) who are committing ‘atrocities’ or clear and present acts of commission, but it’s perhaps the acts of omission from the rest of us which are the most horrific part of the decline in our professional standards, reputation and standing.

We’re too busy maintaining our lifestyles to consider how healthy the fields might be for the farmers that come after us.

It’s dead easy to ‘make a success’ by intensively farming today. It’s much harder to maintain a steady life helping the generations that come after.

It seems pretty obvious that as we all bump around in a state of wilful blindness, allowing some bad guys to get away with some terrible acts of commission under our very eyes and in plain sight, we forget it was the work and the sacrifice and the development of the generations that came before us who stood us in this place. We have a responsibility and a debt to pay which is forward to the generations that come next.

Perhaps one of the things we might consider doing to absolve ourselves from our terrible acts of omission (and I include us all in this) is for us to encourage someone to come into dentistry who has the view and the vision and the passion to make it better for the next 40 years.

Instead of the standard “I wouldn’t introduce my children to dentistry” Why not introduce someone to dentistry who has a vision to make it better?

Why not bring someone in who is a leader, someone whose ethical compass is cemented in the right direction and who understands that rewards in dentistry can be great but only to the good guys, only to the people who are actually good at it and who do it in an ethical way.

That would become a positive act of commission.

That would become a proactive stance which said that there were 30,000 of us who had it in our sights to bring 1000 people into dentistry every year who were the right people – future healthcare professionals committed to looking after people and to doing the right thing.

We could just ignore all this s**t though and pay the mortgage.

Blog Post Number: 1798