Latest Blog Post

If you take 100 people and introduce them to an educational opportunity, you might be surprised by the results.

You probably will not be surprised by how many people pass or fail or by how many people excel or dump, but you may be surprised who does which.

Education is a lottery, the same as electing politicians and class presidents and any other selection process that humans decide to undertake (and education is a selection process).

Therefore, the best opportunity we have to find the most gifted and talented and enthusiastic and motivated and visionary and creative individuals is to put as many through the process as we can.

Back in 2002, when my daughter was just six weeks old, I presented what was one of the very first courses for dental nurses in implant dentistry in the United Kingdom.

There were probably ones before that that I didn't know about, but I was asked to develop and provide that course because nobody else knew of another one that existed at that stage.

Interestingly, I put together a program and I found a cool way to add a copyright symbol to the bottom of that program using my (almost) brand new Advent laptop, which had recently been bought from curry's before even PC World existed.

I applied that copyright symbol to the program and in later years the program would go around the houses and other people would claim it was theirs but had never found a way to remove the copyright symbol.

I watched people present that program as if they had invented it looking directly at the copyright symbol and smiling ‘imitation is the greatest form of flattery’ but back to the point…

We developed and presented a two-day nurse’s course for implant dentistry, basic on day one and advanced on day two at Leeds General Infirmary in March of 2002.

I then presented that course literally dozens of times in dozens of venues and ultimately when I thought I got too busy to do that anymore because I was doing other things, handed the reins over to other people within the ITI to be able to do that, most notably to my friend and colleague, Colin Burns.

At that time, we were jumping on the bandwagon of everyone saying the development of the dental team was the most important thing that we could do to make our businesses better and safer and improve the quality and the enjoyment of the working environment.

I truly and wholeheartedly believed that then and I truly and wholeheartedly believe that now, but it is still a lottery.

You can pick the best person you want to go on any sort of course and then be surprised by how badly they do or amazed at how it inspires them to greater things.

It is worth mentioning here that both our managing director and our stand-in general manager as our current general manager is off having her first baby, were both trainee dental nurses.

The people who hold the most important, highest paid and most senior salaried positions within my organisation were both trainee dental nurses.

There is no such thing as ‘just a dental nurse’.

And so, with that in mind, I would like to present to you our latest iteration of how to empower and enhance and actively encourage your dental nurses within your organisation to step forward and improve and be better.

We have based our Online Dental Implant Nursing Course around all the rest of the courses that we provide online.

A six-week format, one week onboarding, one week catching up at the end and four weeks of extraordinary content so that your dental nurses can now train to a high level in implant dentistry without leaving their living room or their surgery depending upon when you would like them to do it.

This removes a number of enormous barriers to training dental nurses, not least the barrier of:

1) Travelling to an alternative site, which has to be paid for by a boss (who is usually too stingy to pay for it).

2) Overnight accommodation again to be paid for by a boss with the same difficult problems as number one.

3) Time off work, which may affect the boss’s productivity.

4) The fear of going distant to somewhere else where you might never have been before.

This will allow dental nurses to expand their horizons, find out new things and explore areas of their own, which they'd like to be better at.

It allows a starting point on a journey to become a managing director or a general manager or a compliance manager, or a clinic manager or a TCO, or any number of careers in dental nursing, which are now open and available for people to develop through their working lives.

This isn't the end of it, though.

As soon as we have a tribe of people committed enough within the dental nursing community who have done this course, we’ll start to put face to face events together so that people can meet and get to see each other and get to learn more and be better and better.

This is way overdue, and I'm sorry it's late.

But what we wanted to do was develop a nurse’s course by nurses for nurses to make nurses better.

Almost all of this content has been put together by some of the incredible nursing team at The Campbell Clinic, and it will probably be one of the best courses we ever provide.

More information is here, and we would love to see you guys on the course!

Blog Post Number - 3321