Good days and bad days. Ups and downs. Calm and panic. Darkness and light.
Does this sound familiar?
Is this what your weeks are filled with?
It’s certainly what mine are like.
Most of the time I feel solid, secure going forwards and knowing that we are all in the same boat, but sometimes it just gets a bit much.
I feel like I’m looking into a twilight zone episode but I’m also part of the episode as one of the characters at the same time.
Clearly we are all navigating waters that we've never been to before and none of us are old enough to have remembered any of the impacts of the great depression of the pandemics of the early 20th century.
We’ve become very comfortable, almost greedy in our expectation and our entitlement of what we should be able to have and how we should be able to live.
Shaking that off will be difficult and changing our mindset will be a challenge.
While I understand that many people’s instinct is just to get to work on anything, with the current anxieties, the incessant news and the shifting sands, that can be the least productive thing to do.
‘Calm heads and cool leadership’ looking at the problem objectively and removing the emotion as best you can, in order to find a solid way forward over the longer-term (this will not be fixed by the end of next week!).
So, the way forwards, as far as I can see it is together and while I understand that people want to branch off on their own, protect their interest or their bubble, look after themselves (and their family) ,the solution to this is a together solution.
That’s the same for society as it is for my profession in Dentistry.
I can see that Dentistry fractures in different directions and every association that we have is providing some sort of sudo guidelines or instruction to their member because they too feel like they need to be doing something to justify the fees that they charge and the time that they spend.
I had a fascinating discussion with my wife yesterday, who’s looking after a sick child who’s at one of the private schools in Nottingham.
The private school have now decided to hand out lots of work to the pupils who would have done their GCSEs and A Levels, to help them ‘just in case’ the exam boards come back and ask them for further evidence of their possible grades.
While I can kind of understand the rational for that, it’s justifying the fact that they are still taking money off the parents of those children without providing them any formal education.
They’re acting outside the guidelines and what most of the other schools are doing in a self-protectionist fashion.
In Dentistry we already have institutions and organisations who are tasked with negotiating with the government and representing our interests and our position and I don’t think we need any more than that.
Whether you like the BDA (British Dental Association) or whether you don’t, they are our elected individuals and they have a fully constituted process of being elected to represent the profession as a whole.
Their board of directors (PEC) that’s fully private practitioners present on there and if we wanted to be on that, then we should have sat for election.
What we can’t do now is decide to be the Prime minister because we don’t like what the Prime minister is doing. Our chance to be the prime minister was in the general election.
It’s time for the associations to get together, it’s time for everybody in Dentistry who holds any sort of position of authority, to sit in a room as a whole group and smash out a consensus for the whole of the profession.
There is no point in the Orthodontists doing one thing, while the General Dentists or the Periodontists do another.
If no one will define what a Aerosol Generating Procedure (AGP) is, then we should do it ourselves.
It's not beyond the wit of man to think that the BDA could organise a consensus conference (digitally) with experts of high credibility and define a path forwards.
The International Team for Implantology (ITI) have been doing this for years in Dental Implants.
The interest of community Dentists are now tightly bound up with the interest of hospital based Dentists, in the same way that the interest of NHS General Dental Practitioners are tightly bound up with Private Specialist Practitioners.
For that reason, we should see ourselves as together and as a group of people who ultimately want to return back to serve our patients properly as healthcare Professionals.
Achieving that outcome would tick everyone’s box and will happen much faster if we do this as a group of 30,000 than if we do this as 30 groups of 1,000.
Blog Post Number - 2338
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