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Last night I delivered my ‘GDC / BDA’ lecture again.

That was the one from 2016 at the British Dental Conference which came about 18 months after my GDC FTP investigation was completed.

In the immediate aftermath of the BDA Conference I said I would never do it again. I was more emotionally torn up that I have perhaps ever been in circumstances like that. The pain of ‘admitting’ in public what I felt about everything, the standing ovation at the end and the carnage that ensued after that.

I felt that it shouldn’t be me. I shouldn’t have to expose myself like that again. I felt I have achieved what I set out to do when I accepted the invitation. But with all these things, and probably with the ‘peak end rule’ applying, time passed and I decided to speak about it again.

Last year I spoke to my own referring dental practitioners in my own locality, not a massive number but 40 or 50 turned out and I cried again.

I did a version of it for my friend David in Belfast at his practice for about 15 people and cried again.

Last night I went to Reading and guess what?...

The problem with the issues of regulation in dentistry and the assault on the profession is that it’s still here.

Some of the mechanisms that made me so frustrated in 2016 have vanished due to self-imposed reforms from the GDC itself, but the damage that this has caused is still very real and deep-seated. The resentment, the fear and the defensive dentistry are worse than ever.

I’m not sad for me now as I was back then, I’m sad for us.

I think it’s unlikely I’ll ever be accused of dishonesty again (still possible I suppose) but I think the damage that has been done to a generation of practitioners and the urban myths and stories that filter through to the new graduates about the GDC are now so deep rooted that it will take the most herculean of efforts to turn the oil tanker around.

That’s why I drove for five hours yesterday to give a lecture to a couple of dozen people in Reading and it’s why I’ll present it again in London in February.

It’s updated now but many of the issues are still the same.

The saddest truth though is that there are people in the profession, in our Governing Bodies and in our positions of authority that seem to be past this crisis and on to the next one.

We never sorted this and we never sorted ourselves. It’s probably worse now than it was in many ways and the behaviour of some of our professional colleagues, the work they carry out and the things that they do requires a heavy hand in regulation.

The solutions need to come from us though because they won’t come from anywhere else.

Blog Post Number: 1882