Imagine this…
… It’s 80 years ago last week and there are 300,000 troops stranded on the beach in Dunkirk.
Deep below Whitehall, Winston Churchill and his war cabinet are discussing how to try to save some of the soldiers.
Churchill comes up with a plan of mobilising a fleet of small privately owned boats, anyone who will go to try to rescue the troops.
He begins to put the plan into actions but then realises it’s necessary for him to construct an elaborate series of standard operating procedures and minimum requirements for the standard of the kit of the boats, the training of the captains, and the competencies of the crews.
Many of the boats will have to be excluded because they don’t have appropriate life jackets or safety equipment, some of them are diesel not petrol.
Some of the boats are too small and some are too big, some of the boats make their living from fishing and others with coast guard duties and others carrying freight and some of them were excluded due to department for transport regulations which are in direct contravention of admiralty regulations.
And we can’t use lifeboats because they have to be retained in case someone goes swimming on a lilo.
In the end out of a potential 1,000 ships available and due to stringent regulations and health and safety executive orders they’re only allowed to mobilise 150 with plans to ‘roll-out’ further evacuation ships over an agreed period which would be ratified by Whitehall.
Please don’t think that I’m trivialising in any way what happened in Dunkirk and the lives that were lost and the sacrifices that were made.
But when ‘organisational drag’ enters any institution or organisation or country the ability to react in a creative way vanishes.
It’s not a significant life threatening situation the fact that dentistry is still closed (pretty much in any event) but there are likely to be thousands of people now with undiagnosed Cancer and we all know that the early diagnosis of oral cancer is the key to survival.
There are many people in what is classed as a civilised country suffering significant pain and distress and discomfort together with psychological distress as they understand that their oral health is deteriorating.
The truth is that we were not renowned for great oral health in the UK in first place and for any of us who have been able and privileged to travel abroad on Busman’s holidays will know that many places have much better oral health than here.
We weren’t starting from a position of strength and we’re certainly not in a position of strength now.
Leadership is the ability to cut through the sh*t and to achieve the things that need to be done.
The ability to do that effectively saved 300,000 lives at Dunkirk perhaps a little bit of the Dunkirk spirit now from people who consider themselves to be in positions of leadership in dentistry would not go a miss.
Blog Post Number - 2392
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