July Update

And so, we hit July in the middle of summer in a bubble of post-election excitement (Or do we?). 

For those of us working within dentistry, political shifts always seem to promise enormous opportunities or disadvantages, or at least disturbances in our work and working patterns. But I wonder whether there will be any difference following this election.

I am not politically minded, particularly although I will always vote. I just don't think there is enough money in the bankrupt country to make significant changes to dentistry other than within the independent sector. 

I believe we're heading towards decades in which we will build our private healthcare sector to offset the disadvantages of the NHS. I hope that we will be able to use the NHS to treat the people who need it most in society. I certainly believe this is likely to be a labour agenda, even if it is unspoken.

So, changes may happen, but they will be unlikely to be seismic, and it would probably be best for us all if we focused on the end of our noses and carried on with what we're doing rather than worrying about whether some big magic, political one would come to change the landscape.

For us, there is much to look forward to and many things going on.

Learning from Failure Conference and Charity Ball

A big thing on our agenda for later this year is our Learning from Failure Conference and Charity ball.

Some specific invites for the Learning from Failure Conference will be coming out to some of our regular contributors and co-conspirators, and the Learning from Failure Conference is liable to be another extraordinary event, being the third of these that we've ever hosted (the first two prior to moving practice). 

This event will have Eddie the Eagle speaking as our main keynote speaker after lunch, but we will also have people such as Josh Sharpling, a dentist from the south of England whose dad is an extremely famous CDT, who will chat about the difficulties of different characters in dentistry and how to navigate that and the chase for perfection.

My friend Sue Storey, an extraordinarily talented woman (not a dentist), will give a huge and insightful talk.

Sue has lots of experience of working with stadium safety in the United Kingdom and experience of the Hillsborough disaster.

She will give an emotional and insightful talk about what she's learned from an extraordinary career.

John Gibson will also be talking.

John is one of the main mentors of my career in my life, but he has also been a showstopper at any event that we've had, and he's spoken for us many times.

John's talk to our peer review group was one of the best peer review meetings we've ever had. 

John's son took his own life by suicide in 2019, immediately prior to the pandemic and following this, John has formed and devoted his life to a pre-prevention and postvention suicide charity called The Canmore Trust.

John's lecture will be one not to be missed about learning from mistakes, learning from failures and learning from dark times.

I will also talk about what happened when we built the practice.

I've decided I'm in a position to be able to talk about this properly now, having never properly done it before, never telling the story of the things that happened, that went wrong, how close we nearly got to ruin, how disastrous it could have been.

We'll have a mix of clinical and non-clinical talks at the Learning from Failure Conference but no one who attends the conference will be left unmarked or unchanged by what they hear or what they see.

I hope we might be able to see you there. The details are here.

Immediately following the Learning from Failure Conference will be the charity ball. This will be the seventh (or maybe it's the eighth time) we've provided a fancy dress charity ball. 

This year it will be at the Village Hotel on the 23rd of November and the theme will be Christmas fancy dress.

We already have considerable interest in this from the regular attendees and the people who contribute.

I hope you might think about making it your Christmas night out for your team because not only can you have a brilliant get-together in a really fun environment, but you can also help us raise loads of money for people like the Canmore Trust, Bridge2Aid, The Children's Bereavement Centre, JUNO, and Framework. 

A really exciting development for us is that the day before, we'll also be hosting Chris Barrow's 100 business group and providing them with a specific and bespoke lecture day on the future of digital dentistry and technology in dentistry.

We'll discuss technology in the treatment rooms and technology in the business overall, how AI is impacting our business, and other technological advances we have planned.

Peer Review and Buying Group

We continue to grow and expand our dental buying group, and if you've never seen this before, I think you'd be keen to have a look.

You have the opportunity to sign up with us to be part of our buying group, which helps to support and fund the peer review meetings that we have at the clinic.

The buying group has a board of founding members who decide on the education and how the money is spent, but in essence, you get huge discounts at Wright Dental Supplies (You don't have to commit to Wrights permanently for anything), but you get big discounts on what you already buy and 5% of the whole buying group spend gets sent back to the middle to spend on education.

We're very quickly reaching a point with the pot here where we will have to decide what to do with quite a considerable sum of money to provide an educational event.

We also have amazing evenings with peer review, with groups of like-minded people, dentists, and teams getting together, sharing their woes and troubles, and generally being face-to-face and non-digital.

We've had some extraordinary events this year, and many more are coming. The details of the peer review meetings are here.

If you would like to be involved in peer review or sign up to be part of our group or simply wish to attend a peer review meeting, then don't hesitate to get hold of Millie, who runs this for us right here.

Other News

A couple of final things from us here.

We recently spent a considerable sum of money (tens of thousands) installing two extremely smart cameras in the academy space to record our lectures in real-time.

One camera is designed to capture the lecturer, while the other is designed to capture the audience and question interaction. 

It means that many of our courses can now also be streamed live and recorded for later consumption, not just a picture of the lecturer talking to a slide background but a whole experience of the room itself, of the audience, and of the question-and-answer sessions related to it.

It's part of our commitment to improving our educational offerings across all of our implant and business education offerings, and you may well benefit from it if you're a regular attendee to peer review meetings or any of our other courses.

Finally, you may or may not be aware that we have a dedicated research service within the practice and are regular contributors to and publishers of scientific-based research in peer-reviewed journals.

Our most recent publication has been published in the British Dental Journal and relates to our experience of intravenous sedation over the past few years.

Some years ago, I realised that we were providing much less overall sedation than other practices I was aware of. We were regularly averaging sedation doses of between four and five mg of midazolam for all of our procedures in the practice. We've now counted this very carefully and analysed our average sedation doses and what is required for individual procedures.

It is quite eye-opening and, in fact, game-changing to understand that if you take a little bit longer to sedate patients and allow midazolam to reach its proper therapeutic dose, your overall dose is reduced and reduced.

It's all explained in the article in the British Dental Journal. 

If you would like a copy of it, the link is here.

All that is left for me is to say, have a happy summertime. I used up all my holidays going to the Euros to watch Scotland and then Glastonbury, so I'll be in and around all the way through the summer when everybody else is on their holidays.

I hope yours is great.

See you soon.