Over the last few years, we’ve become accustomed to managing ‘this week’s crisis’.
For us, not so long ago, it was trying to finish our practice construction before the deadlines of all the things we had to do despite all the barriers that were put in place.
There were GDC cases and clinicians trying to cut their fingers off and people wanting to leave and falling referral numbers and just generalised carnage.
Then there was covid, the biggest crisis in living memory, and then there was starting back again in a whole new world of regulations and standard operating procedures and all of that.
Then there were the people leaving the profession, left, right, centre and centre again and wondering whether you could staff it or not.
Then there was the prospect of a nuclear war and then there was inflation, higher than many people who are currently in dentistry can imagine from living memory.
I just had a letter from the bank telling me that the mortgage has gone up by 0.5 percent.
Then there was the recruitment crisis again where everybody in every single position in every aspect of dentistry became harder to recruit and harder to retain and it’s tough to do dentistry with no people in it.
Add into all of that, that we are massively behind in our marketing and massively behind in our financial management and massively behind in our branding and massively behind in learning new clinical techniques that will give us a jump on the person up the road?
And through all of that how do you survive and what do you do?
When we were locked down at the end of March in 2020, we decided to insulate ourselves and get to work.
We might have died, and we might not have died but if we didn’t, it would have been useful to get some work done instead of running about panicking.
Many of the wonderful things that are now happening resulted from that time of just doing the work when everyone else was running around like their hair was on fire.
Amidst all of these crises that is what we continue to do, day after day and week after week.
Some weeks look better than others, some days feel harder than others but when you reflect and look back from where we’ve come from 2 years ago it is a long way indeed.
It’s fine to take stock. It’s fine to reappraise and change direction or make sure you’re in the right direction but there’s nothing that gets more done than doing the work.
Blog Post Number - 3083
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