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Everyone else panic

Colin Campbell
by Colin Campbell on 16/01/25 18:00

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For over 10 years earlier in my career, I worked in medical-legal work.

It was an extraordinary time that I perhaps did not appreciate quite as much as I should have done at the time. 

I was introduced to expert witnessing when a patient was suing me, but it was decided by the dental advisor that I was working with who worked for the MDDS couple MDUS, John Cameron, that I had the makings of an expert and in particular because of my specialist status in oral surgery.

So, during that case, he introduced me to expert witnessing and started to engage me through the MDDUS.

Very quickly, my career in medical-legal stuff took off (thanks a lot to John). I ended up doing extraordinary work in extraordinary cases. I actually travelled to Edinburgh on three separate occasions for 3 days at a time (all paid), and the case itself never went to trial. I didn't even do anything; I didn't sit in court; I went around the shops, went to the gym, went to the cinema—crazy waste of money.

I also ended up working for the NHS Counter Fraud Service and providing evidence in a case where a dentist went to jail for defrauding the NHS (I worked for the prosecution). Most of my work, though, was defence.

And so I was instructed by the defence sides for patients who had a late diagnosis of cancer in practice and also for lots of parts of GDC cases (in advance of my own GDC case). 

What finally queered the deal in medical-legal work was being sucked into everyone else's panic.

The way that solicitors and barristers worked (or at least they did work with me) was that everything was at the 11th hour. 

It would be a Friday afternoon at 4 p.m., and you would be working on a course lecturing, and they would send you a message saying that you had to complete a 56-page document by 6 p.m. that day, or the client would likely be struck off.

This type of stuff, this type of pressure was out with the way I wanted to live my life, and so I was able to say thanks but no thanks, and after the final experting on the GDC case at the Barbican in London, I hung up my typewriter!

From time to time, though, I find myself back in this world, and so I accepted an invitation to speak at the Bupa Dental conference this week in Celtic Manor in Wales but as I lead up to that, and the forums that I'm involved in as a speaker, the emails start to cascade in. Please can you meet here? I will meet you there. Can you please send this? Can we have that?

The ping ping ping, although I have an out-of-office reply that says I'm not there, which probably leads to further people's panic.

You get to choose where, how, and who you work with.

If you're constantly in the world of someone else's panic, you're constantly going to be panicking.

 

Blog Post Number - 4054

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Colin Campbell
Written by Colin Campbell
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