One of the things we focus on as a team together here at The Campbell Clinic is gratitude.

We talk about how lucky we are as often as we can, and we try to remind ourselves of this even when things seem difficult or challenging. It's just tough to get in for an early start at half past seven on a Wednesday morning when the nights are dark, and it's wet, and it seems only minutes ago that it was beautiful weather in the middle of summer. 

One of the most important parts of our culture and philosophy at the Clinic is reminding ourselves that we are so lucky compared to so many other people and so many other aspects of the world. That keeps us going, lets us do our job with a smile on our faces, and genuinely makes us feel grateful for what we do.

It's almost ten years since I sold my business in Alfreton, an NHS specialist practice I had set up in 2008/09 with my previous practice manageress, Angela Leivers. 

After I left the practices in Ilkeston and Wollaton that had been sold to IDH (Mydentist), and I left in very short order because I just did not want to work for a corporate, Ange and I were offered an oral surgery contract for North Derbyshire and we set up Refine Specialist Dental Care. 

It allowed me to continue my work within the National Health Service, which had started the day that I qualified. I worked through hospitals and training in head and neck surgery and then entered general practice in Ilkeston and Wollaton for 11 years.

We built that business up with oral surgery, orthodontics, and some implant work on the side, together with hygiene services and some other things, but in 2015, I decided it was becoming increasingly impractical, difficult, and almost impossible to provide the care that we wanted within the NHS.

So, I decided to leave and focus my work in Nottingham, and Angela bought the practice from me. 

The sad part was that at that stage, after 21 years of NHS work, I was finished. So, I decided then to try to do something with our own business at The Campbell Clinic, to give something back on a more tangible basis because we were no longer providing access to care for people who needed it the most. 

That's when we set up the 1% for charity project that we call our social legacy project.

It was based around 'Let My People Go Surfing' the book by Yvon Chouinard who founded Patagonia and although his quest was to provide money for the planet, ours was to provide money for social legacy.

So, since 2015, we have donated 1% of our annual turnover to social legacy projects.

Over the years, this has become increasingly well organised, and we now have an in-house charity committee that decides how the money is spent and allocated throughout the year.

We support five major charities: The Children's Bereavement Centre in Newark, Juno Women's Aid, Framework, The Canmore Trust, and Bridge2aid. 

By regularly supporting these charities, we're able to provide them with £2,500 every quarter so that they can budget for the money they receive.

We also regularly support food banks throughout Nottingham, provide charity-matched funding to our staff, and make smaller donations to individual charities on a monthly basis.

Our project has an environmental side and a work experience side for young people from atypical backgrounds who are less likely to enter dental careers. 

Please believe me when I tell you that I do not write this or post this stuff to boast or score points in any way, but I watched a presentation from Dr Kath Hare, who leads our charity committee and our charity projects at the Clinic, at a recent team day, and I was blown away by what I didn't realise we did, let alone anyone else. 

The reason that I'm writing about this is because one of the centre points of our charity projects and our social legacy aspirations is the charity ball that we have run on many occasions now since 2015.

With obvious gaps because of COVID, we've run the ball six or seven times now, and it has become one of the focal points of the practice year.

It's always been fancy dress because fancy dress allows you to put on fancy dress and that means you can hide behind a costume and just go and enjoy yourself and pretend to be someone else.

We've done it often as Halloween fancy dress, but this year, we've decided to change it to Christmas fancy dress to make it an opportunity to get together with dental teams around Christmas time, be grateful for what we have, and also give to other people who have less than we have.

The charity balls have raised an extraordinary amount of money, and everyone has had an extraordinary amount of fun. The next one is on November 23rd this year.

This year, we have tied the ball with our Learning from Failure Conference, another part of our Social Legacy project and not-for-profit activities.

We've had several Learning from Failure Conferences in the past before we built the practice, but we were a little bit distracted to have a learning from failure conference.

And so this is the first one back since the practice opened nearly five years ago.

The Learning from Failure Conference is an extraordinary experience in which people stand up and bare their souls, tell you what has happened, what went wrong, and how they have learned from it.

It's not so much a clinical dentistry conference; it's a 'just trying to be better at anything' conference.

It's one of the most extraordinary things I've seen, and some of the presentations will stay with me for the rest of my life.

This takes place on the same day as the ball, November 23rd, and for £250, you can have a ticket to both the ball and the conference. (Please remember it's not for profit.) 

There are still some seats left for the Learning from Failure Conference and this year, we've managed to snag Eddie the Eagle (Yes, Eddie the f*ck*ng Eagle) The guy from the film with Hugh Jackman, the guy who was the British ski jumper at the same Olympics as Cool Runnings.

We hope this will be the most extraordinary day (We stop early on the Saturday at the conference to get back and put on our fancy dress costumes). 

We'd love to see you there.

If you've been before, you'll know what it's like; gather your people together and come again. If you haven't been before, I dare you to try it. It's an extraordinary thing and so much fun. 

Our social legacy projects since 2015 have now raised hundreds and hundreds of thousands of pounds for social legacy projects outside of our own life.

It's a way of showing how glad we are that we are so lucky.

We are all invested in this for the future.

Full details of the conference are here.