It's one thing to have a message, a story you'd like to tell and to tell it, and to think that one or two people might be listening, and they might take it forward, and it might help to make things a little bit brighter or a little bit better for somebody else.
It's quite something else, though, when someone else tells it on your behalf.
I remember being stunned when I was in the main room at the ITI World Congress in Singapore (a room that seated 6000 people, but there weren't quite 6000 in it at the time) and someone presented my prophetic slide with my name on it. It was my friend Maya from Gdańsk in Poland who'd done our business course, and she spent just a little bit of her short time on the main stage in that enormous room talking about our concept of prethics and what it meant to healthcare and to people in healthcare. Spreading our what.
This week is another opportunity for that type of thing to happen, because, as December swings around and has been the tradition for a few years now, I've been invited to speak to the Midlands DFT Group, which was historically hosted at Aston University in Birmingham.
This is a group of all the Midlands DFTs, but this year it's been split in two, and so today, when you read this, I'll be returning back or have returned back from speaking to the group in Birmingham in the West Midlands and tomorrow, the group will be in the East Midlands, but because of scheduling and other places I was supposed to be, then my friend and colleague from the practice, Dominic Smithers, will be speaking to that group.
We won't be providing the same talk and an introduction to implants, oral surgery and entrepreneurship, but it's the same title and the same philosophy because we've got our heads together.
Dominic's talk will probably be harder-hitting even than mine is in this regard, but the truth is, and certainly has been over the last two decades, that when you speak to these groups, they are split into two sections.
On the one hand, let's say the left-hand side of the room as you're looking, is a group of people who have only come into dentistry for money and status, they show very little interest in the well-being of patients or the profession or their colleagues or the teams, and they are there to collect bright shiny objects of consumer natures, using dentistry as the fuel for their habits.
The other group, let's say the right side as you look at it, are clear, committed healthcare professionals who want to do the right thing and be the best dentists. Sure, they want to make a good living, and they understand that dentistry can provide that, but not at the expense of their principles or at their philosophy of do no harm and look after people first.
These are difficult groups to speak to because they are juxtaposed. The requirements of the audience on the left-hand side as you look is entirely at odds with the audience on the right, and of course, in these circumstances, you can really only speak to one group.
It has been my habit over the past few years of doing this, to make sure I'm absolutely clear to send the message that dentistry is not the money pit for people that it used to be, not the dripping roast or golden goose that people could drop into without any ethical approach, do what they wanted, and run away with all the money. We hope that message sticks and gets through, but I have been seeing groups of that nature since at least 2005, and we will definitely still be seeing some of them going forward for a few years yet.
The joy, though, is that on the Thursday it will be Dom sending that message, someone who I met at one of these days at Ellen Road in Leeds in 2019 where I expressed those values, someone who wanted to adopt those values, someone who did, and then ultimately came to work with us and then is carving his own path and goodness knows where, and probably to places that I've never been or seen, but he's sharing the message that I stole from other people about ethics and dentistry, and then he ‘stole’ from me.
Doesn't really get much better than that, I promise, not really.
Blog Post Number - 4367