We have a saying in our practice: "The nurses run the practice, not the dentists", and it's true.
We've been working on this track for many years to get to the situation where all the operational side of the clinic is run by the nursing team. It's extraordinary to watch; in fact, earlier this year, at the end of a course that I was presenting, one of the dentists had asked for a tour around 5 o'clock on a Friday; the whole place was entirely spotless, like a Michelin star restaurant, the dentist didn't do that, the nurses did that.
We have taken great pride in expanding the role of dental nurses in our clinic, creating roles like treatment coordinators, clinical nurse specialists and others; we've seen people rise through the ranks from dental nurse training to the very highest positions in the practice (Hayley Brown is our managing director, she was a trainee dental nurse with me in 2006).
The only way you can do that is to embrace the dental nurses as an extraordinary professional team, and one of the best ways to do that is to help train them.
Richard Branson used to say, 'Train them so they can leave and treat them so they won't' - not a bad adage to live by.
You know you're doing well at it though, when your nurses themselves put together an online course for other nurses that hasn't even been touched by dentists ( The nurses run the practice).
The Online Dental Implant Nursing Course was designed first for The Campbell Academy and has now been redesigned for the ITI for international consumption. There is now a self-paced, on-demand version of this.
We love the coached version of this, where you can sign up and be coached by nurses online, but some people don't want that; they just want to run through it self-paced, with the least financial impact possible, but with brilliant material.
How would you ever be good as an implant clinician if you'd never trained your nurses? And how do you train your nurses when you don't even have time to train yourself?
The Online Dental Implant Nursing Course is £600 Inc.VAT for the coached version or £199 for on-demand access.
It can be accessed by a nursing team during normal working days or outside of normal working days, depending on how you fly.
It's by nurses, for nurses, and all about nurses.
It's an extraordinary experience to begin the process of empowering your own nurses to run the practice.
Blog Post Number - 4148
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