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One of the greatest joys of writing this blog and publishing it every day is the connection it brings and the discussions it provokes.

It’s rare now that I publish something in the blog and it doesn’t generate a response or contact. If you’re keen to do that you can put comments in the comment box below or you can hit reply and it comes through to my inbox. I try to reply to everybody who comments or replies where possible (I don’t always get that right, but I try my best).

Recently I published a blog called ‘The State we’re in’ and someone was kind enough to point me in the direction of this video. 

This is another one of these promotional videos that I’m sure healthcare bureaucrats love to watch in their offices in white hall where they talk about how they’re going to change the world.

How on earth would it be possible to create this reality?

Success of the government has sponsored the corporatisation of dentistry to a profit only model. We can ‘enforce’ our colleague to attend post-graduate education but in that environment they will do the absolute minimum and will disengage from education for the statutory requirements.

We are about to enter into a manpower crisis in dentistry, fuelled not only by brexit but by falling wages for dentists in the UK and less advantageous conditions framed by the burden of over regulation and over administration.

Health Education England has no money. That is not a secret. Any body I speak to with any links to Health Education are telling me that the budgets have been crippled. Any recourses to train vocational dental practitioners let alone other dentists on a life long training pathway will not exist. So where does this leave us in the future of dental education?

The two options stated in the video for the future training of dentistry seem reasonable and as I have said before mediocrity will not be rewarded in UK dentistry anymore.

To have a blended approach to education for dentists and to allow them the opportunity to move through their career advancing their skills at a pace that suits them in relation to their personal circumstances seems entirely sensible but it is unlikely to be able to be provided for dentists except for private providers.

Private education providers will in no way be able to provide quality education unless there is a budget to pay for it. If that budget is to be raised from the practitioners themselves how are they to do that when their wages are falling year on year?

I hate to do this but I told everybody about this in a blog years ago when I made the decision to stop speaking on ‘section 63’. For those of you who don’t know section 63, this was the old fashioned Health Education courses which was subsidised for dentists and the speakers were paid on a daily rate which included a speaker fee and an out of practice allowance.

I provided hundreds of section 63 hours to thousands of section 63 delegates until the point where the regulations changed; because I was in private practice with no contract I was not allowed to claim the out of practice expenses and found myself lecturing for full days beside non specialist colleagues who were being paid twice as much as me because they had an NHS contract.

How will we encourage the specialists and higher level practitioners to pass their knowledge on to the next generation in the structures listed in the video when we treat them like second class citizens and pay them half the price of everybody else.

I will be engaging fully in the process of trying to encourage and inspire the next generation of dentists. Starting in two weeks time when I begin interviewing pupils from 5 schools across the East Midlands to give them mock dental interview experience.

We will continue our intern programme for work experience at the practice and also for dentists in training. I will continue to speak to dental students (February next year in Glasgow) and other opportunities to try and assist in this process.

We cannot though, rely on the good will of colleagues to provide a structured training programme for dentistry for the next 30 years.

Perhaps the first thing we can do is speak honestly about the situation we find ourselves in.

Blog post number: 1472