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Nowadays the weekend warrior is someone who does Triathlons but back in 1998, the weekend warrior was someone who did a two-day course on implant dentistry and then went out to practice implant dentistry for the rest of their career, perhaps going to the odd international conference when the success of the business allowed it.

We’ve spent 20 years eradicating the weekend warrior.

(incidentally I was a weekend warrior who did a two-day surgical restorative course and then placed an implant but I did have three years of maxillofacial surgery behind me)

Over the 20 years we have eradicated this we have bought MScs and structures into implant dentistry. We have bought PDPs and an overarching GDC. We have insisted on quality in training but we’ve also allowed the companies and the education institutes to bastardise that, not measuring how many individuals come out of training and actually do the thing they’re supposed to do.

There is though a sinister move back towards the weekend warrior mentality where people learn from Facebook, watch a case from someone else and go and try it in their practice. That is not really an acceptable way to work and not really a safe way to work, particularly when you consider how few implants most practitioners do and how poor they probably are on the competency curve without knowing it.

Social media has a lot to answer for in the way it educates people in all sorts of subjects, but none less than healthcare.

We moved away from the weekend warrior for a reason, let’s not head back there anytime soon.

Blog Post Number: 1913