Crazy conversations this week in different places, most of which, for obvious reasons, should just be anonymous.
I travelled to Birmingham to speak to a group of about 80 DFTs. I had 45 minutes to talk about oral surgery, implants ( as careers), plus entrepreneurship. Not enough time to talk about one of those things, let alone 3, particularly in a Scottish accent. I stood in front of a group of people who are the brightest and most intelligent in society, who worked the hardest to get into dental school, right in the middle of COVID.
We were damaged by the start of this and have exited the other side, as always now, into a world which is entirely different to that which they thought it was 5 or 6 years ago.
What I found out, though, this week before I went to attend this group, was that 42% of them will come out of DFT and work less than 30 hours a week ( by choice).
Do the math on that, but it is effectively a 50% reduction in manpower and dentistry.
In what world do you go to dental school for 5 years? Rack up the debt that you have and then decide to come and work part-time. I don't get it. What are you doing with the rest of your time? The change in what people think is important, what they think they're entitled to and what they think they will be able to achieve is just quite staggering in a relatively short period of time.
I know that things were different back 30-odd years ago when I was doing this, but in my 2nd year out from work, I was a 1st year senior house officer in Nottingham at Queen's Medical Centre.
In my first year, I'd worked as a house officer in Glasgow. I had no paid on-call, but I went on call on a voluntary basis to try to learn my trade.
I was on call shadowing in the New Year in 1994/ 5. Voluntarily, free of charge, to try to see what my job would be like the following year. The following year, I was on call for the whole of December at Queen's Medical Centre and in the weeks running up to Christmas, I did 100 hours, then 120 hours, then 110.
Do the math on that.
It's hardly any sleep at all; the reason for that is that we were short-staffed, and it was ‘expected’. We didn't work shifts; we did the job that needed to be done. It was an insane amount of work, but by the end of my first 6 months as a senior house officer, I could suture up a facial laceration pretty well because I had done so many. I could play a fractured mandible, and I could do all the minor rural surgeries I was doing during the day and the on-calls for the trauma and the oncology patients at night.
The guys that I was speaking to in Birmingham, at least half of whom will be trying to cut down their hours to less than a third of what I was working in December 1995, this seems like an unfixable problem.
The change in societal attitudes, the unwillingness to work and the lack of understanding that in order to build a career, it takes decades of hard work so the trick is to find a job that you love, that you're happy to put your heart and soul into, because that's how you get to a better place at the same time, I spoke to someone who's a coach who looks after people who are neurodivergent. We had a brief conversation, I asked her if the incidence of neurodivergency had increased or whether we saw it more. They were telling me that they were absolutely clear that it had always been there to the same degree, but had increased, and we had increased in our ability to diagnose.
I'm not so sure about this. I genuinely think that where we were before was a place where we learned to adapt because we had to, and now we're giving people the opportunity to not adapt if they don't want to.
We all have weird character traits, me more than most, and so you have to adapt your circumstances and your conditions and work hard to be a better version of yourself.
But nowadays People don't want to do this so much, it seems. I'm not quite sure how we fix it.
Blog Post Number - 4368
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