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There is a saying that’s developed around The Campbell Clinic Team, certainly between Carl Dunstan and I, this saying was introduced by Carl this week.

“It’s the second mouse that gets the cheese” this infers that the first mouse gets killed by the mouse trap and It seems to encompass the strategy that we’ve adopted (either consciously or unconsciously) over the past two weeks.

The furlough process at The Campbell Clinic and The Campbell Academy was completed some 10 days after it was announced by the Chancellor.

We made the active decision last week not to enter into this in the first instance, until we could see what shape the land took over the coming week.

Taking into consideration all the information from the channels that we are getting it from, we made the decision that this was the best thing to do , in a calm and controlled way and tried to communicate it as well as we could with the team, to make sure they understood the rational behind what we were doing.

We kept in place the key workers that needed to be in position for the activity of the business at the time and furloughed the remainder of the team.

We were able to do this with many discussions in a controlled fashion through the week and then finally decided that it was the right thing to do yesterday.

We watched everybody last week get on the bandwagon as fast as humanly possible, only to see some of our colleagues trying to reverse the process when the NHS announcement came out in England.

The most important thing for me was the message to the team about why we were doing this and what it meant.

I also tried to explain this in the first Chris Barrow webinar that I did over 10 days ago, about shutting Dental Practices.

Many people were desperate to get their Practice closed but it was obvious to me that closing a practice is easy but if it’s done on safety grounds then you can’t open it back up because you’re skint.

I believe this will be the thing that keeps practices closed for a while, is trying to unravel the safety elements of this.

And so, the best idea would have been to work as deep into this as was safe, to limit the time we were in and maximise the contingency we had in our bank accounts to keep our teams in place.

The advice that I had been chatting to people about which is what we’ve applied to our own situation from the start, has not changed at all in the past two weeks, despite the ups and downs of what has come from the Politician and the Healthcare Administrators and anyone else you care to get your information from, that advice is as follows:

Whatever that means to you, this particularly relates to people who are elderly and people who have comorbidities and most importantly to both, if your family is safe and sounds at the other side of this they will be able to support you to get back on your feet, in whichever way is necessary.

I tried to be clear about this on the Webinar last week, but my understanding of this is that everybody should attempt to cut their monthly personal finances by about 70% where possible. Basically, that means that (your new) standard set of finances will last you three times longer than they did before, so that any assets you have can help you through this or help your Business through this.

If this means cancelling your Sky TV subscription and your Amazon Prime and Netflix (or any two of the above) then that’s the way it must be. If it means looking at all the direct debits that come out of your bank account and cutting 7/10 (or 70% of the cost) and drinking instant coffee instead of Nespresso, then that’s the way it goes. I think only when people appreciate this will they understand how important it is to get themselves a solid footing.

Once you’ve done the first two, then you’re able to start to scan the environment from a position of calm, instead of a position of panic.

You can then become proactive and then hopefully become predictive.

Today, in The Campbell Clinic/ The Campbell Academy community we had a Journal club, set up by one of our newest Clinicians Angela Cowell. Sadly, I missed it but she did a presentation on the ‘new world’ and encompassed this really well, if her slides are anything to go by.

I will be chatting directly to Angela about this, but while you’re looking for Webinars and extreme amounts of content on the internet, it might be wise to try to find information like this before you move onto the next step, instead of just being killed by the mouse trap whilst someone else comes behind you and steels your cheese.

Blog Post Number - 2323