You may have seen from my social media outlets that I was at the ITI UK and Ireland Congress in Liverpool last week. The benefits of attending these national and international meetings are massive to anybody in clinical dentistry and probably to anybody in any profession.
The opportunity to see exceptional clinicians and lecturers present, the opportunity to walk around trade shows to see new developments in dentistry and the opportunity to meet old friends and make new ones is fantastic.
I had a busy congress as I was lucky enough to be involved with the organisation of it and therefore didn’t get to see as many of the lectures as I would have liked. I came away from Liverpool thinking that the educational experience had been no less for the fact that I had missed some lectures because some of the conversations I had at the coffee breaks and in the bars were fantastic, enlightening and better than any lecture I could attend. This, is what I believe makes these congresses so important and the essence of a congress and the meeting of people is the concept of peer-review.
Back in the late 1990’s I was privileged enough to be involved in a fantastic peer-review group in Derbyshire and I think that this was the best type of post-graduate education I had come across. The peer-review groups didn’t really have a register, they didn’t have aims and objectives and they didn’t have the chance to feedback in any formal way. That said, I think it was probably one of the best learning experiences I have had and when I go to congresses the discussions are the best way to learn.It is a shame we can’t put these down in our verifiable CPD logs and it would be terrible if we lost the opportunity to do this with the onset of lots of different ways of earning our CPD in the future. I still feel that it is a far better way of learning about advances and changes in dentistry than reading an article, answering some questions and posting it back to a machine.
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