If I had been clever, I'd have made a video of this, but then I'm not that clever.
Many, many, many years ago, when I was a very young man, and I had just arrived in Nottingham from Glasgow in a car with all of my life possessions in it, and I was living in an on-call room in Queen's Medical Centre with a shared sitting room (One bedroom, one kitchen, one bathroom, shared sitting room, two people) I learned to hand tie.
When you're a head and neck surgery SHO (or whatever the name is now), hand tying is an essential skill if you want to progress.
It's the ability to tie a suture (a stitch) just with your hands, not by wrapping it around the needle holder and then creating a knot and pulling it tight.
If you get good at hand tying, you can do it really quickly, and you use it in major open surgery to tie off blood vessels and the like.
Think of a stomach that's cut wide open, and then you're wrapping thread around a vessel and then tying it very quickly with your hands; there's a system to this; you tie in one direction, then another, and then it closes the knot, and it's tight.
When you were working with the (Godlike) head and neck surgery consultant in the middle of a cancer operation, they would look at you and say, "Can you hand tie?" If you could, they would start to let you do something; if you couldn't, they would not.
I quickly realised this.
I watched how they did it, and when I went back to my on-call room one weekend, I took a bit of string and, sat down beside the leg of a chair and taught myself to hand tie.
No one ever taught me how to do that. I just figured it out myself, but I know I'm doing it right because I know the knots stay in the right place.
It's a fantastic skill to have. It's massively impressive if you're working with a dental nurse who's never seen it, massively impressive to a patient or a DFT or anyone like that, and it's also hugely effective.
If you're a dentist, think of when you're doing a third molar extraction it allows you to really tightly close something together so that it stops bleeding (Dental tip 4-0 Vicryl is a great hand tie Suture).
What's the point of all this nonsense, though?
The point is this…
I learned how to hand tie back in 1995 by teaching myself. I now have 30 years of hand-tying experience because I took the time to do that one weekend. The lifetime value of what I did is extraordinary.
If you learn something like this once, and you can use it day by day, week by week and year by year, it compounds like interest in the bank. That's how knowledge works, that's how education works, that's how gaining skills in your work works.
And so, last weekend, we had the Learning from Failure Conference, and we didn't teach anyone how to do composite, no one how to place implants, and nothing about clear aligner treatments.
So this concept of 'learn to earn' didn't exist in there, but I promise you (and I have read the feedback) that there was no one who was in that room that didn't take something away, which they will use day by day and week by week and year by year for the rest of their lives.
I cannot get dentists to come on basic surgical skills courses; they're not interested because they don't see the point, so I don't have an opportunity to teach them how to hand tie. I think that's really sad because the truth is that if you pick the right things to learn, you get the maximum benefit for the years to come.
We'll be doing the Learning from Failure Conference again next year. We'll also be doing our version of a TED Conference (Although I'm obviously not allowed to call it that).
I promise on those conferences that what you will learn will be greater than you can imagine in value for the rest of your life.
Blog Post Number - 4005
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