In May of this year I had the privilege to speak to the British Dental Conference in Manchester to around 1000 people.
Following that lecture I was asked to speak at several different events which I had to decline due to time constraints but one invitation I promised I would keep immediately after the event was the opportunity to speak to final year Dental Students in London.
This lecture is coming up at the start of September but what would you say to people who are about to enter the profession and start their professional career and life in a job which is entirely different to the one it was five years ago.
The main reason I accepted this invitation to speak is that the person who asked me to talk explained to me that most final year dental students are quite disillusioned with the way dentistry has become over their time at dental school. They are not excited about becoming dentists as they see a collapse of the NHS, difficulty in achieving a foundation dental position and limited opportunity to pay off the colossal debts they carry.
What advice would you give to these guys?
How would you inspire them to become leaders of our profession in the future?
How could you communicate with them how fantastic it is to be a dentist and what a privilege it is to work within this profession.
The advice that I will give will be to cast off the chase for cash, the gravy train is over in dentistry. For graduates starting in their early twenties there is no exponential growth in income like there was for graduates that started for the past twenty or thirty years.
Dentists will join normal society, not some grumpy super income elite in their twenties who earn more than their peers. They will have to learn to love the job they do and unfortunately the way to do this is to be outside of GDS NHS.
It may be necessary for graduates to work within GDS NHS at least part time to help service their loans but my advice would be to get as much experience outside of this, either in hospital or in private practice to keep their interest and to see what is possible in dentistry.
I will also be explaining to them that I think it is essential that they work or experience dentistry overseas. The problem with this is that many of them will not come back.
I attended a lecture recently by Rachel Tabor who was an ITI Scholar at the University of Geneva and then stayed on as a dentist in the hospital. She had qualified in England and worked in Wales and taken a chance to be an ITI Scholar, where Scholars are given a $30,000 bursary to travel overseas and work for a year. Not so much money when you have no network, no foundations, difficulty with the language and nowhere to live.
I have met several ITI Scholars in recent times and generally they are some of the happiest dentists I come across. They love their work, they love the friends they have made, they love the environments in which they work.
