It’s a long time ago that I stood in the oral medicine clinic at Glasgow Dental Hospital and School as a newly qualified house officer.
I saw a patient one day with atypical facial pain and I asked him (as I’d been trained to do by the then Dr. John Gibson) if there was anything else that could be contributing to their pain, like a life event or a difficulty that they were experiencing.
The patient answered no and then after a short break of silence which I intentionally left, answered “well, actually, yes”.
Afterwards, John Gibson would tell me to develop that talent as it was priceless and not everyone was able to exhibit those responses from patients.
To me, it felt like the most natural thing in the world.
27 years on from that I find myself still having conversations in the same way, just with different people, sometimes with patients and sometimes not.
I’m privileged enough to be someone who people seem to be comfortable to tell the truth to and so the conversations about brokenness become more and more and more prevalent.
I hold an extraordinarily privileged position in so many aspects of my life but not least with the people who will give me their attention or allow me to speak to them and more and more of these people (some who occupy very lofty positions indeed) are explaining that their teams, their organisations, their friends and families, are broken.
The societal battleground that comes next (excluding climate change which is a real battleground obviously) will be the one of societal brokenness.
The chasm between the have’s and the have not’s just got extraordinarily wide and gets wider every minute and the brokenness of people who have lost the ritual and routine of personal contact, of care, of comfort, of safety, enlarges by the minute.
On the simplest of levels, for somewhere like The Campbell Clinic, that means that our priority must be to look after our own and come together as a group and to stay together because the ability to keep your team together now is the major battleground in the post-covid world.
If you were to chat to an organisation where everyone has been working from home for 15 or 18 months and are now saying that they don’t want to come back, why on earth would they not just jump to another organisation for more money, for the same job.
Everyone needs human contact and everything we do now is about leveraging human contact to heal the pain and keep us afloat.
Blog Post Number - 2782
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