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The Lecture Trance

Colin Campbell
by Colin Campbell on 15/01/19 18:00
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I first spoke to dentists (as a dentist) in December of 1995.

It was a regional maxillofacial study day at Queen’s Medical Centre that our department was hosting. I had been a Senior House Officer in the department since the start of August.

It was right before Christmas and I had worked three on call weeks due to lack of staff for something like 100, 120 and 110 hours.

I was utterly terrible, presenting on deep circumflex iliac artery grafts.

It was the first time I had ever spoken in front of a group of dentists as far as I can recall, having done bits and bobs as President of the students at Glasgow 18 months before.

Since then, and taking a conservative estimate, I have provided somewhere in the region of 1,000 one – three hour lectures plus other stuff where I have stood up in front of people and spoke.

The funny thing is that I usually over prepare this stuff so an hour’s worth of lecturing equals hours of preparation but when I walk out the other side I can’t remember what I said.

I am also exhausted, most of the time, after speaking – something that my wife always notices. So, I’m not doing it right, I’m not protecting myself and it’s not like a job.

A lot of the time though when I speak in smaller groups stuff happens and I think of things or things come up. One of those times and one of those things happened at the lecture in Reading last Wednesday.

It was a typical rush driving from Nottingham to Reading and then to go over the presentation I had already gone over several times to make sure it was right and to make final changes which were totally unnecessary.

I then had the obligatory IT crisis where, in the beautiful conference suite that Nick Fahey had booked for the BDA group, ‘it doesn’t take Mac’

It doesn’t take Mac?

It doesn’t take the most popular presenting laptop in the world?

Repeatedly the guy who was helping us with the audio visual was basically blaming me for bringing a Mac, luckily I have encountered this situation many, many times before.

We finally solved the problem and I could get underway to talk the talk about the GDC and my FTP case which is a different lecture every time I do it.

In the middle of the lecture though I have a slide of the sign on President Harry S. Truman’s desk. Which has engraved on it ‘The buck stops here’ (it’s the sign on the wall in my office)

Amidst the amnesia and the hypnosis of a lecture and trying to get the point across that we all have a responsibility to fix the problems that exist in our profession I realised the solution is really quite simple.

I asked the audience what they did today to make the profession just a little bit better.

I asked them what WE did.

I told them that it was easy and all we had to do was a little thing every day and show it to other people and if everybody did it we would make an enormous difference.

While I realise that the interpretation of ‘making a difference’ is a subjective one, we won’t be far of the mark if we all have a go at that.

Karl O’Higgins (Planmeca) had popped in to see that talk, there were about 50 people at it I think, and he said we had to email everyone the next day to ask if they’d done anything to improve the profession and then email them again three days later.

Now wouldn’t that be a good Facebook page? One where you posted just one think you had done that day that moved dentistry on to better place, was altruistic and bigger than you, even if it was tiny.

I should have time each day to do something good for the profession that has given me so much and I think we all should too.

 

Blog Post Number: 1887

 

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Colin Campbell
Written by Colin Campbell
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