Today I sat with Laura Byron and Anna Lawson.
Anna has been a friend of mine for many years; a fellow dentist who runs a practice in Nottingham and who works together with myself and Laura to try to set the Peer Review schedule for our Peer Review group at the practice.
The Peer Review started as a Study Club when we were back in the bungalow more than 10 years ago. There were times we’d get 50 people a month to learn about the advances in dentistry or talk to each other. It’s now much more difficult to get people to come.
One of the things that is difficult is to come up with amazing ideas which are brilliant and that people will be interested in to come and share, collaborate and learn from.
You find the most amazing speakers, you book them and you turn up and five people are there.
The truth is that people are just too busy for everything.
I don’t think it’s because what we put on is cr*p, I think it’s just difficult to build a tribe and continue to keep them together when there are a million things distracting us on a day-to-day basis.
None the less, we continue.
Our Peer Review numbers have increased (if only a little bit) and the minimum number we get is higher than the minimum number we used to get and the maximum number is bigger.
It’s tied up with our dental buying group in conjunction with Wrights which is an extraordinary project that saves dentists loads of money and also contributes a small amount of money back into the Peer Review fund to allow us to book great speakers.
The problem with Peer Review is that people have to come to it. Maybe later we will stream them (although that is like putting live 3 o’clock games of football on the telly)
In the meantime, we will continue to keep on keeping on.
It would be possible to wrap it up and decide to stop. It’s hard for me to measure the value in Peer Review apart from the fact it helps people, it helps me and it keeps the community intact.
Next year’s topics for us will include basic surgical skills (practical session) live endo technology and crown printing, sleep apnoea, endocrinology, wellness, composite (obviously) and ortho for GDPS.
Keep an eye out. I hope you’ll come.
It’s nice to meet up with people, talk, stress, vent, eat, learn a little bit and just remember we are a community of people working together to try and make it better for the patients we look after.
Blog Post Number - 4362
Leave a comment