The Campbell Academy Blog (118)

The return of collaboration

On our Slack team timeline, the amazing Louise, who works with us, posted a picture from four years ago of one of my slides at the grand opening evening of The Campbell Clinic extension project that we called Project Disneyland.

That was the evening at the Riverbank where we unveiled to the world that we were building a practice up the road in Edwalton, which, although was a poorly kept secret, had not been paid attention to by many people.

We had 100 dentists in that room that night. We've never got close to that again since

They didn't come because they loved us; they came because they were nosy.

One of the conversations we have quite often in the practice now is how disliked we are by a significant section of the dental profession local to our practice.

I'm not entirely sure what the cause of that is (but then, who knows why they're dislikeable). Still, it's true that we put on tons and tons of free collaborative stuff for our local dental community, including inspirational speakers who've been in the Olympics and fantastic clinical educators yet still struggle to gain any traction among the 800 – 1,000 general dental practitioners in our locality.

We have a lot of email addresses, and we send many emails, but people just don't come because dentists, by their nature in the UK, don't collaborate.

The main theme of the evening of the launch night four years ago was that the clinic was being built to promote collaboration, and we have had the opportunity to collaborate at the highest level with some of the most extraordinary people and industry partners. However, we still can't seem to manage it with the average GDP in Nottingham.

And so, we start again because you should always continue to do this.

I returned from the ITI in Portugal with the most incredible urge to continue to collaborate after meeting some extraordinary people (some of whom are in direct competition with us in one form or another) who are open and honest and understand that the way of the world is for collaboration or else we've all had it.

For many years now, at least since the early 2000s, dentistry in the United Kingdom has been heading away from collaboration.

There are now enough patients for everyone due to the crisis that we are in.

And so, we have a responsibility but also an imperative to begin the process again and to start working together for the benefit of our patients (and, therefore, ultimately, a massive benefit to us and our teams).

Give us a chance to collaborate one way or another.

See what happens. It's extraordinary.