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Keep it light Colin

Colin Campbell
by Colin Campbell on 21/02/19 18:00
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It’s half term this week in the glorious East Midlands and I’m supposed to be off work at the same time as my kids are off school but, in the noble pursuit of trying to kill myself by working too hard, I go to London to speak at the London Hospital Dental Club tomorrow.

It’s that old GDC lecture thing again.

This time it’s 45 minutes to perhaps 200 – 250 people. I said I would do this about a year ago having turned it down once before. I can tell myself I have a responsibility to the profession to tell this story or that I’m doing a good thing by helping other people (you don’t get paid for lectures like this)

In the lead up to this though, the person who booked me had a conversation on the phone with me and asked me to “try to keep it light Colin”

I said I would do my best but I feel it’s likely that I will be speaking on slightly false pretences in regards to that matter.

How am I supposed to ‘keep it light’?

I have decided I’m going to introduce the lecture like this…

I’ll apologise about the false pretences, about how I might find it difficult to ‘keep it light’ or tell them about listening to Garry Barlow’s second biography recently while riding my bike in the shed.

I read a lot and listen to a lot of different things but I can recommend both of Gary Barlow’s biographies as things you might never have picked up but are actually quite extraordinary stories.

There was one particular chapter in the second book which relates to this story.

As I was cycling in the shed Gary Barlow started to tell the story of his daughter who died, she was stillborn.

I realised that I had stopped cycling and I was sitting on my stationary bike, listening to Gary tell the story, on audiobook, of the death of his daughter.

I am going to quote below verbatim what he said in his audiobook because I will never forget it.

He was asked, immediately after the death of his daughter, by the undertaker “Which coffin would you like?”

This was Gary Barlow’s reply:

Which coffin would I like? Which coffin, for my dead daughter, would I like?”

Can you imagine if the publisher had asked Gary Barlow to ‘keep that chapter light’?

While I’m not suggesting that a GDC FtP case is anything like as horrendous and traumatic as the death of a child, I can tell you this, as I will tell the audience tomorrow and as I have told every audience I have spoken to about this experience. For a practitioner like me to be accused by his professional regulator of dishonesty is akin to seeing a girl being beaten up by her boyfriend or partner on a Saturday night in town, separating them both (at much risk to yourself) and taking the girl home in a taxi and making sure she was ok, only to be accused by the girl of rape the following day.

I know this is true because I was accused of dishonesty and that is what it felt like.

It felt like I imagined it would feel had I been wrongly accused of rape.

The damage that this type of thing has caused to the morale and psychological approach to healthcare of the dental profession must not go under estimated.

While there is light at the end of this tunnel, there is much work to be done to rebuild bridges and confidences of the patient / dentist relationship, the patient / regulator relationship and the dentist / regulator relationship.

It’s rare for me to speak in any lecture without making a joke so I’ll try my hardest (yet again) not to make this doom and gloom and to afford some possible solutions out of this mess. Unlikely though that I’ll be able to ‘keep it light’

To do that would risk trivialising a situation which is not trivial, we’re not ready to put this situation into cartoons just yet.

 

Blog Post Number: 1924

 

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Colin Campbell
Written by Colin Campbell
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