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When the GDC came 2.0 - Part 5

Colin Campbell
by Colin Campbell on 21/11/20 18:00

The damage

- Click here to read part 4 

It’s the 29th February at 2pm and I’m sat in my new office at work.

There is a window behind me but my desk and my chair face forwards to the door of my office and it looks towards the top of the stairs.

If you haven’t been to see us yet, you can press a button on a control and the glass opaque's to shut out the world.

No one comes in when the glass is opaque.

Saturday 29th February is a little bit different though because it’s a friends and family open day for the new clinic. We’ve now been open for just three weeks and what should be a celebration of crossing the finish line is brutal and terrible and one of the hardest things.

Without this complaint it was be the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life, much, much harder than I could have ever imagined.

The set backs have been truly awful and I’m trying to pick up the pieces, but every time I pick up the pieces someone explodes another bomb which blows into another million pieces and I try to pick them up and then they explode again.

There’s doughnuts, balloons, drinks, smiles, giggles and happiness and children, parents, boyfriends, girlfriends and people walking around and “oooo’s” and “ahhhh’s” and “haven’t you done well’s” and I’m sat there with 72 pages of vile, vitriol and bile in front of me because it’s the only time I’ve got to do this f*cking complaint response.

They walk past the door and I apologise that I have work to do but say hi and mouth platitudes to peoples relatives about how proud we are and how lucky we are and how wonderful it is and all the time I feel like someone has strapped the building to my back and I’m trying to carry it up a hill.

I feel responsible for everybody who comes, for the livelihoods they earn and for the happiness they seek at work and these two bound volumes in front of me which I know are heading to the worst possible place are sucking the last bit of life out of me.

The complaint is vile, the worst kind of complaint, the psychological complaint.

It unpicks my character as the worst possible person.

I am a cheat, a liar, a manipulator.

I am a used car salesman who is trying to use the letters after my name to extract the money from your wallet or your purse.

I am arrogant, bulletproof, untouchable and I do whatever I like to get whatever I want at the expense of the vulnerable and the weak.

That about sums it up.

So, I will spend that afternoon, the one that we planned a year ago where I would welcome all the families of our team and we would laugh and joke and be astonished at what we’d achieved and instead it would be horrible and I will arrive home drained, exhausted and emotionally broken again and wonder why the hell I’m doing this.

As always I’ll pull my socks up and I’ll try harder and I’ll wake up the next day and I’ll say “you are not doing this to me” and I will compartmentalize it off and lock it in a box and put it under the bed until someone opens it up again for me. And so, the response goes off and the legal guys say it’s good and we wait for the next episode.

Before the next episode of this complaint we shut the practice on the 24th March like everybody else, with no sign of any income for the foreseeable future and we get to work trying to keep the business afloat.

I had to write a letter (under instruction) to say to the individual patient that there is nothing else I can do to help you and do your best or do your worst.

So, on the 23rd April I received a letter from the Dental Law Partnership requesting case notes.

And so, the game begins.

Worth mentioning here that it seems like a standard procedure for the legal letter to appear first followed by the letter from the GDC.

I believe the tactic is that you’ll be so consumed by the GDC that you will perhaps allow the legal stuff to go by the wayside.

Four days later came the letter from the GDC.

 

Blog Post Number - 2560 

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Colin Campbell
Written by Colin Campbell
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