Sometimes, and almost always unexpectedly, the fog clears for a minute and you get a vision.
In the distance you see where it is you're going.
Maybe you'd forgotten or maybe you never realised in the first place but in that moment something brilliant happens and you can see the path ahead.
In my case it doesn't happen often enough and despite practising techniques or putting myself in circumstances or situations where 'the creative process' should happen more often, these snatches of what we could be, how good we could be, how amazing things could be only happen infrequently. But one happened today and i'm writing this immediately afterwards or else I would forget.
I was chatting to Kath (our post doc Research Coordinator) and we were talking about sinus graft figures in preparation for next years lectures and how to present the numbers. She got excited for a minute to show me some work we've been doing on our maintenance audit run through Karen and Emma, our amazing hygienists at the practice. This service evaluation of maintenance patients has been running now since 2012 but it has taken someone with Kath's vision and someone with the Excel genius of Charlotte Harrison to bring the numbers together to show us what they really mean and what we could really do. It was an astonishing moment to see the amount of data we have, how we can use it and how we can present it (as a genuine gift to the profession and to patients) on how maintenance works in practice and how our system helps our patients maintain their health.
Bizarrely, it also shows a huge business opportunity which is an entirely separate and totally unintended beautiful coincidence in relation to the numbers.
It shows us the impact of doing a mass reinvigoration of people who have dropped off maintenance and how, when they come back, they stay with the practice but that's an aside.
We have the opportunity now to take these numbers and develop them and we have the people in myself, Karen, Emma, Andy, Raj, Beatriz and others in the practice who are prepared to go and talk about it and show it because we believe it works. Now we can show in numbers that it works.
I only hope now that I can keep my head above water long enough to be able to see this all come to fruition and provide the benefits it's possible to give.
Blog Post Number: 1104
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