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An honest question for you guys out there and I hope that you would press reply and tell me the answer.

Last year I managed to wiggle my way back into DFT teaching again through a huge favour off my friend and colleague Jason Wong.

I had been ex-communicated from DFT Teaching when I left my post as a DFT trainer in 2008 after the practices I worked in were sold to corporate.

I had missed it and I loved teaching the DFT’s, generally and honestly I would do it for nothing, but sometimes when insult upon insult is thrown at you in the attempt to do good things, you wonder whether or not you are doing the right thing and whether it is worth it.

I was asked to speak to the Nottingham DFT’s and it was a lovely day with twenty or thirty in the morning and the same in the afternoon.

Some of the guys that came to that day, ended up coming to visit the practice to see what we do and I hope that they were inspired and learned something to help them in their careers.

One in particular came to see me about the possibilities of setting up a Young East Midlands BDA group and that would be wonderful indeed and make a huge difference to the profession locally, so it was a great day.

The difficulty with it this year was it fell in the middle of my sinus grafting course, which is one of my favourite courses and one of our most successful courses for the academy (next years is pretty much full already).

The best day of that course is the cadaver course, where we have fresh frozen heads to practice surgery and to teach it in fine detail for the delegates who come. I decided to miss that to teach the DFT’s to do the better thing.

Please frame this against the knowledge that I get paid 50% of a “normal” dentist who teaches on the DFT group.

Because I do not have an NHS contract I am ineligible for out of practice expenses (as if I don’t have any out of practice expenses) and that means that basically speaking, anyone who has an NHS contract will be paid 2x what I am paid for teaching on those days (and it still isn’t very much relatively speaking).

I had a grumble about that some years ago but decided to accept that was the way of things to let me go back to the DFT’s. As I said above, I would gladly do it for nothing.

Clearly though, I wouldn’t because I received an email from the DFT administration team this week to say that the invoice that we had submitted in July was unable to be paid for some sort of crazy administrative reason.

That invoice was paid in July, it’s now October.

That will be submitted and ultimately the money will be paid across, but it is so much work to even submit the invoice and to submit the forms related to providing the teaching that it will inevitably disincentivize anybody who is half decent from every doing this, because it is such a pain in the a**e.

Add into that the fact that you get 50% of the fee of everybody else and then the fact that it is scheduled again a year in advance for the same day, which falls on my sinus grafting cadaver day.

Next year will be the biggest sinus course we have ever provided and the biggest cadaver day we’ve ever done and I am trying to think of reasons why I should give that up and give it away to go and try to inspire the next generation.

They’ve also moved the day to Leicester from Nottingham, so now I have to travel and receive half the money and probably not get paid again after doing all of the admin.

Together with that I have asked several questions of the administrative team, but the person who I dealt with had left and nobody wants to answer.

NHS education is clearly in some difficulty and the worse this gets, the less likely the good guys are to go and help and teach.

That is pretty short term.

Blog Post Number - 2169