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I read with interest the 5^th NHS Confident Monitor Practice Plan Survey that came through into my email inbox the other day. This is a really excellent piece of work that I took part in and answered questions on. I am amazed that only 400 dentists were able to take part in this because it could turn into an extraordinary body of work with greater response rate that could be significant. That said I still think it is still a pretty significant thing to read and a great service to the profession.

You can read through the many statistics, the link to the report is here if you haven’t seen it, you should have a look at it, it’s well presented.

To me though the most horrifying and stark statistic was that 74% of NHS practitioners and 65% of private practitioners said that they would not recommend dentistry as a profession to a friend or a family member.

These people are trapped in a job that they don’t like. Lacking enthusiasm and inspiration while treating their patients, grinding out to retirement.

It’s easy for me to say ‘they should just give up’ but of course it’s not as easy as that as people are trapped in the system and married to the lifestyle stuck in a wealth cage.

What is it that we think they are looking for? What would be better than this? To not work and still get paid? Plenty of people get fed up with that after a short while. To do a different job that has “no stress”, no deadlines and no hassle?

I know and am friendly with plenty of people outside of dentistry and the ones that are the happiest are the ones that made a choice not to exist in the rat race anymore and accepted the financial penalty for this. In the end the financial penalty was no penalty at all.

So once again in these pages and for the record I would love any of my children to enter dentistry. I feel sure I could show them a way to navigate dentistry to have a wonderful fulfilling career, working wherever they wanted in the world, helping people however they wanted. We do this with the work experience guys and the elected students that come to the practice. There is no question that I was most influenced throughout my school and university years by the people who were most enthusiastic. It’s a shame that up to ¾ of people who work in dentistry are no longer enthusiastic about it.

Blog post number: 1421