Latest Blog Post

Last Thursday we reached the last day of our Year Two Implant Course for the 11 delegates that attended and it was a little bit sad.

It’s probably what it will feel like when your children leave home. You know they’re ready for the world outside but you have become so close to them that you don’t want to let them go.

Boy, this was a good group, this is a good group.

They will go out now as, what really looks to us, as ethical, honest and capable implant practitioners, ready to place lots of implants in patients to improve their lives, but also to continue to learn and improve their skills.

This group will continue on SLACK (our discussion forum) that was set up for all our courses and is a living breathing thing that I bet they will use for years to come and continue to stay close to each other.

We will try and arrange some alumni days for them but they may arrange them for themselves. In the end I am both proud and sad of what we have achieved with this group.

It’s easy for me to say that isn’t it, it’s easy for me to humble brag in an advert for our courses and say “why don’t you come on year two as well and do what these guys have done?”

Well, here are some of the rules you would need to abide by if you wanted to come on that course and make it work.

1. You’d need to be open to discussion and be prepared to change your views in the light of research and influence from people who understand the subject better.
2. You’d need to invest heavily in yourself, in time and discussion and money and emotion and energy.
3. You’d need to put other things aside to commit to the development of your implant practice or it wouldn’t work. 

Three and a half years ago we set our stall out on a five-year programme for guys interested in implant dentistry to get them to 50 implants or more because we had defined that as being health and stability in an implant practice.

And so, I went round the room on the last day to each of the delegates (there were 10 as one of the delegates couldn’t make the last afternoon)

8 out of 10, 80% of the guys on our year course are placing more than 50 implants per year after two years.

Some of them have been placing implants a little bit longer but with a good grounding in implant dentistry and then our year two course, 80% of them are over 50 implants per year.

Of the two that are not there, they’re both over 20 and they have a plan and a strategy to move towards 50 in a relatively short period of time with which we will help.

One of the delegates may not move to 50 because he may choose to retain his practice (which is very diverse clinically) in the situation that it’s in and therefore won’t wish to commit the time to get to 50, but that’s the only reason why.

The other person will get to 50 within a short period of time.

I take you back to what we said at the start of this, the implant companies say that 90% of their customers place 15 dental implants or less a year and that is across the industry.

I also take you back to the point that industry studies showed that only 7% of people who attended surgical implant courses were still placing implants at two years.

Just one more time for luck… 80% of our year two delegates are placing 50 or more implants per year.

Next year the courses change again and we introduce Shaun Sellars as our ethics lecturer and we update the programmes and update the material once more.

We have new courses that we have not ran before which will be included in the year two bundle.

If you’re interested in doing this and doing it properly on your five year platform to become a competent, capable and ethical implant dentist then get in touch.

Colin and Shaun’s podcast ‘Incisive, Decisive’ is available here.

Blog Post Number: 1814