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Many years ago, I was the secretary of the East Midlands British Dental Association, in charge of booking the speakers for the 9 meetings we a had a year.

Basically, the President of that year would give me the details of the speakers and I would book them, or try to book them and try to fill in all the newly invented educational objective stationary that was coming out of the deanery that had to be done.

I did have the honour and the privilege to be the Secretary of Malcolm Pendlebury. Very sadly Malcolm died before he ever sat down in the Presidents chair at our meeting, but his speakers had all been booked.

I remember the battles with Malcolm in booking his speakers because he had some of the most extraordinary guys to come to the East Midlands to talk because of his connections but none of them wanted to fill out the new paper work.

Malcolm and I had long discussions about how (from my point of view as Secretary) we had to get these forms done, and Malcolm’s view was “these are some of the best speakers in the industry and they don’t do aims and objectives, they’re just brilliant”. In the end, I think I cobbled something together for each speaker invented by myself just to ‘tick the box’. Malcolm was right. Although he never got to see the guys speak, I can remember every single one, this shaped my career going forwards.

We now live in a world where every time you do a lecture it has to have aims, objectives, learning outcomes and goodness knows what else related to educational principles or philosophies.

It’s now gone a bit bonkers though.

I have been asked to speak at an up and coming event (let’s not name it) and a month before the event I have to submit my presentation and PowerPoint on a standard PowerPoint presentation (set up by them) which is branded and set up exactly how I should use it (according to them).

It has slides in it that say things like “it might be good to put a picture here” and “you can use bullet points but not too many”.

I’ve done about 1,000 lectures and I don’t present on PowerPoint.

I use Keynote and have done for years, because it looks better, it functions better and everybody accepts it. I think that Keynote is probably the most used presentation programme in Europe but the people I am working with won’t accept Keynote.

It’s easy enough to flick between the two, it doesn’t matter to me, I can put it on a PowerPoint and just get ahead but when you start to constrain speakers and ask them to work outside their usual format and ask to see their presentations before you start so they can vert out any slides which might be ‘controversial’ then you lose the point of presentations at all.

The one feedback question in clinical presentations, that should be paid much attention to, and never is…

“How much did this presentation positively alter your clinical practice and the way you look after patients?”. Mark that on a scale of 1-10. Anybody who repeatedly scores over 7 should be invited back to present because they’re making a difference to the lives of the ‘end user’.

I should learn my lesson and not say yes to these things because for me, I have to be able to get my views and perspective across to start and stimulate the bait, and if I don’t I don’t see the point in what I am doing.

I will suffer this next presentation as a robot, but I need to learn my lesson not to do it again.

Blog post number: 1621