On the 10th September 2014 I had the privilege of speaking to final year dental students at Barts and the Royal London dental school in Whitechapel in London.
I did a lecture to the British Dental Conference in May this year to a very big room and was asked to speak to several different groups following that and the only one I said yes to was this.
This was an unpaid event to 75 dental students who were entering their final year and half way through the communications module and the assessment for foundation training.
It was a huge privilege to speak to these guys in the year that I was 20 years qualified. If I could bottle what the majority of these guys have and sell it I would be a rich man indeed and I would change the world. These guys are enthusiastic, ethical, desperate to be released into the profession to do the best they can for treating patients apart from a very few who are honest enough to tell me that they were in this for the money. How is it that we go from a huge percentage of graduates who just exude ethics and a need to do things properly to people who think the world owes them a living so that is what TWOMAL is to me. It’s a group of dentists who think that they’re owed a huge income for mediocrity and we spent a long time on the 10th September with the students discussing the fact that mediocrity isn’t rewarded in society anymore.
What I wanted to get across to these guys was that if they invested in themselves early in their career, got a broad range of experience and hopefully even got abroad to see dentistry done in another way, they could return to profession they loved and enjoyed and do great things and probably would earn a very good living. I tried to explain to them that if they didn’t do that and they tried to catapult themselves up the income scale as high as they could as early as they could, that they would never get better and they would live a life (45 years of working) which would be miserable.
Many of the people I meet in dentistry now are just not prepared to reduce levels of income in order to improve themselves either personally nor professionally and I think it is a big mistake, perhaps this is a society wide problem but I can only see it through the eyes of a dentist and dentistry where I think people have very little to complain about and everything to gain from trying to make themselves as good as they can.
Immediately following the meeting I was asked to speak at the British Dental Student conference in London in March but the dates have a clash and I can’t make it I was gutted because it’s one of the most enjoyable things I’ve done in dentistry.
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