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About 18 months ago, we were getting our heads together at the Clinic to try to figure out how to create something which was of interest to people that we work with outside of the practice and would bring people together to talk about their work and the challenges they had, and just to provide a safe place to be together as a group of like-minded professionals.

Back over a decade ago, we created a peer review group network, which was really successful for a while. We used to get between 20 and 40 people a month come together, meet up and have something to eat and listen to somebody talk about some aspect of dentistry or otherwise.

In the intervening years, digital dentistry and the whole revolution of technology just got in the way and pushed people back to their houses as they were able to just log in to dental meetings while they were watching Netflix and eating Dominos.

While this seems really desirable on dark winter nights, it really doesn't have the same effect.

In other news and in another time, I used to travel to London with my friend, Shaun Reason (Tom, our marketing director’s dad) to see inspirational speakers outside of the world of business, speak to people who worked inside the world of business in events run by the London Business Forum (LBF).

Shaun and I would go every couple of months to London to LBF events and saw diverse groups of people, including Daniel Goleman, who first described emotional intelligence and Edward De Bono, who wrote Lateral Thinking.

I saw Chris Hoy and Bob Geldof and many other people share their experiences of their success from atypical pathways and from unusual directions and I was inspired by this to try to share these experiences with other people myself.

And so, fast forward again to 18 months ago, we were trying to build something which was similar to that from very humble beginnings, but to give people the opportunity to share at these inspirational evenings and have discussions with people who have experiences which can benefit us all.

We came up with the peer review groups and our peer review groups have now been running every two months in the Clinic for quite a while.

We first started to introduce our clinicians or other clinicians from other parts of Nottingham or from further afield to talk about areas of dentistry and to encourage discussion and learning in a face-to-face environment.

After a while, we realised that it would be really cool to have people to come every alternate time to talk about stuff that wasn't to do with dentistry.

And so, since then, we've had people such as Ed Clancy, the triple Olympic gold medal cyclist, Sara Symington, a performance director for British cycling who took England netball to win their first ever Commonwealth gold medal.

We've had Chris Dakin, who spoke about occlusion but many other people to come and speak to us about different subjects and different aspects of life, which not only makes us better at treating patients, but just better at being us.

And so, this continues now with the further development of our dental buying group, which is supported by our friends at Wrights.  

Those who are currently involved in our buying group get really quite extraordinary discounts on products through the Buying group discount scheme but the group itself also gets a rebate, which comes back to the centre and some of which is donated to charity, while the rest of it is recycled into educational events, both dental and non-dental.

If you're interested in being one of the guys in the buying group, you might want to click here and read more about it.

We are now starting to open that out to a wider audience, not just in Nottingham.

But the big news is that in January we have Geordan Murphy coming to speak.

Geordan is one of Premiership Rugby's most decorated players enjoying an illustrious career both internationally with Ireland and domestically with Leicester Tigers.  Geordan will draw on his experience of playing and coaching at the highest level to address how to bring issues such as peak performance, leadership and teamwork from the rugby field into the business world to maximise success.

The other thing is that Jordan speaks for charity so, the money that we usually pay to external speakers he will recycle straight back into his chosen charity, the Matt Hampson foundation.

We have a limited number of spaces to come and see Geordan that night.

So, if you're interested in coming, just email Rebecca here and she will save you a space.

We've opened this up to patients as well, so we expect that it should be full and so really it is on a first come, first served basis.

Hope to see you there.

Blog Post Number - 3286