After I left my junior house jobs at Glasgow dental hospital I travelled south to Nottingham to become a senior house officer in maxillofacial surgery.
I arrived in Nottingham knowing no one with my whole life in my car and pitched up to the doctor’s residences. The first day of work, I was introduced to a registrar from Manchester who was doubly qualified and had trained in plastic surgery, neuro surgery, general surgery and oral surgery. I was intimidated. This registrar went on to have some of the most profound influence in my career and the way that I provide treatment for my patients.
His name is Phillip Hollows. Phil was a registrar on maxillofacial surgery. He is now consultant head and neck surgeon at Queen’s Medical Centre in Nottingham. He is one of the best surgeons... no he is the best surgeon I have ever seen and one of the main reasons I would never had done maxillofacial surgery because I could never be as good as him.
He taught me many things, both practical, from a communication perspective and from a medical perspective particularly and he showed me that the best surgeons are always physician first. The most important thing he showed me was when he explained to me one day when we were taking out some lower third molars under local anaesthetic. This is a man who does huge major head and neck operations, for cancer, trauma and craniofacial reasons, but there he was taking out lower third molars for a patient under local anaesthetic and explaining to me that this was the most important thing in that patients life at the time. Just because it was a routine procedure for us did not mean that it was routine procedure for them. I always remembered that.
Whether I was doing a scaling, a filling, taking out third molars or doing a full arch reconstruction, it is the most important thing for that patient at the time. When we are patients it feels like the most important thing to us. Thank you to Phil Hollows.
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