Part 5 – The effect on the Registrant or “wisdom enters through the wound”
Read the previous blogs in this series here, here, here, here, here and here.
There is no question that a referral to the General Dental Council encourages one to reflect upon ones practicing life, in fact it encourages someone like me to reflect upon life in general. This is exactly what the General Dental Council would like; to ensure that we reflect upon our practice to see whether there are any improvements we can make and to see if there are any deficiencies that need to be corrected.
Encouraging practitioners to do this I completely applaud. Giving the patients the right to complain if they feel that they have been poorly treated I entirely uphold, but not at the expense of the professionals themselves. Not at the expense of the dignity, sanity and wellbeing of the professionals who set out to help people in the first instance.
This is the aftermath of the process. This is the collateral damage which occurs as a result of the process. This is the damage that the process provides: to fracture a profession, to force us into hiding, to teach us to practice defensively and to make us scared to try to help people to the best of our ability for fear of retribution.
In my case, without the support of my wife I would have cracked entirely. She was utterly amazing and able to provide a perspective on this which I couldn’t see many times throughout. More than that, she believed in me. It was very hard for her to watch at the times when it was at its worst and to see me disassociated and vacant, to lose my spark, my motivation and to be entirely and utterly stressed. This was a stress like no other in my professional life, this felt like an accusation of rape.
From my own point of view I lost my motivation and love for dentistry, a thing that has been such a huge part of my life for the past twenty five years and something I have been hugely proud of; the son of a motor mechanic with no business being allowed to do the things to help patients that I have been allowed to do. To have that questioned and pulled apart so viciously and horribly was absolutely devastating.
I stopped writing my blog which I love so much, I shied away from difficult decisions and difficult things, and sinus grafts were terrible and horrible to do. Any patients who were upset at the practice opened the wound entirely and made me stressed, worried, upset, defensive and genuinely terrified. I tried not to shy away from difficult cases where I would be able to help people. I tried not to let my self confidence fracture, to descend into a gibbering wreck but it was difficult at times and looking back now from the other side of it, it was a terrible time in my career.
Without the support from the people at home, without the support of some of my closest guys at work, without the support of some of my colleagues who were absolutely outstanding in reassuring me that I wasn’t actually a criminal and in the end I hadn’t done anything wrong.
This is where the aftermath is, which I will talk about in the next blog post. What comes next, after you have been through the fire and the wound has been opened?
The Native Americans say, “wisdom enters through the wound”. There is wisdom entering through this wound; the question is what to do with it.
It is essential that we all use the opportunity to get our views across to Government. Please submit your responses to the Health Select Committee Accountability Hearing by 19th February here.
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