Quite a lot of conversations over the past 4-8 weeks have been with people in work or jobs where the knowledge of hands on activity is essential.
For my own work I can’t see, in any way, how you can possibly train people without letting them get hands on experience.
In the relatively short-term we’ve reached a situation where the new dental graduates from 2019 have now had at least 25% of the hands on clinical experience removed and their first year with not a great deal of prospect of hands on clinical experience before Christmas.
If that turns out to be the case then 9 months of their first 24 months of work and hands on clinical experience will have been removed and you can extrapolate that out among many other hands on careers particularly in healthcare.
How do you quantify that damage to a future career of an individual?
How do you rectify that?
By the time I completed my first-year post qualification I had taken out literally hundreds and hundreds of teeth.
By the end of my second year, I had stitched up faces, assisted in Cancer operations, assisted in major trauma operations and ran lists of my own taking out complex teeth in a hospital setting.
By the end of my third year I was way beyond that.
While that training was not perfect and certainly not perfect in the provision of excellent care, the clinicians involved learnt and learnt and learnt.
The ethical side of things was kept and checked by your colleagues and you were encouraged ‘to get your hands wet’.
It seems now you’re encouraged not to.
While the skilled, hands on healthcare practitioner of later years becomes more and more valuable, less and less young guys are able to gain the experience, this is a collapsing model (obviously).
Now, more than ever, we have to be creative and inventive to develop situations were people can get hands on experience to become the clinicians of the future.
Blog Post Number - 2463
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