Patient Update

As I sit at the start of September to write our patient newsletter for this month, it's raining outside at about 11 o'clock in the morning.

Today, I had a session put aside to ride my bike outside with one of my friends, but I had to cancel it because riding on British roads in the rain with skinny tyres on a bike is not really conducive to health or success, and that is one of the reasons that I ride my bike-health.

I've ridden a bike for many years now and love it. It is my great hobby, both the riding and counting the miles that I ride, the heartbeats and the power outputs, and all of that. Another reason I do it is that it keeps me healthy.

It gets me my minutes of weekly strenuous activity (more than I'm supposed to) and encourages me not to get too heavy and fat because it's much harder on a bike if you're heavy. 

For all of us, there comes a time when we think about prevention, when we think about health, both for ourselves and for our families and the ones dear to us. 

With this in mind, my wife, my daughter's boyfriend and I have been consuming a book called Outlive by Peter Attia.

If you want to purchase this, you can do so here! 

It's also a very good book on audiobook from Audible. 

Outlive is quite an American Book that relates to American preventative healthcare for the four big diseases: heart disease, Alzheimer's, type 2 diabetes and cancer, but the essence of the book is prevention and early diagnosis, and that is, in fact, at the core and the heart of everything we do at The Campbell Clinic.

In my own career as a surgeon and a surgeon in the United Kingdom, I started life obsessed with somebody who cuts out disease.

I worked in the head and neck cancer department at Queen's Medical Centre, which is why I came to Nottingham, where we did not do any work on the prevention of cancer, only the work on the cutting out of cancer and reconstructing people afterwards.

As a dental implant surgeon (which is the mainstay of my clinical work now), I am someone who repairs things that are already lost, but the future of healthcare is not that; the future of healthcare for all of us at every level is to prevent and early diagnose.

That is one of the main driving factors in my strategic decision to create The Campbell Clinic Total Care Club.

It is a general dentistry scheme that allows people to access their general dental care but encourages and rewards them if they work with us in preventative measures and means to keep teeth and reduce disease instead of just paying to fix it.

The ideal scenario for our Total Care Club patients is that they never need anything else other than hygiene maintenance treatments and check-ups with their dentist to ensure that all is well.

That is the entire essence of the Total Care Club.

Of course, we will fix anything that's broken because things happen, things break, and people already have previous disease that has been repaired and needs to be repaired again. (It's worth understanding that once a tooth is ever cut with a dental drill, it's likely to need more treatment.) 

But in a world where we want to look at our Children and hope that they might never have a filling or that their teeth will be able to be straightened sensitively and conservatively so their smile is natural and beautiful and they're checked up on regularly to make sure that all is well, then that is the direction that we would like to travel.

The discussion of Children's health and prevention is also super current at the moment, particularly after the new prime minister, Keir Starmer's interview on the BBC yesterday. 

It's easy for politicians who are new in government to tell people how bad everything is, but they only get to do that for a short period of time before they have a responsibility to fix it.

Keir Starmer's description of the state of the NHS yesterday was telling because he is the first prime minister to talk about this with such clarity and such honesty at this stage. 

He focused on the effect that lack of investment and poor systems has had on Children's health, and I know this only too well from my wife's work with Children at the Queen's Medical Centre in Nottingham.

He did not talk specifically or directly about the effect that poor investment in the NHS has had on Children's dental health, but we all know in dentistry what has happened and how bad this has become.

It's why we made the clear and strategic decision in The Campbell Clinic Total Care Club to ensure that Children are always treated for free for all of their routine dental needs if their parents are members of the club.

It's why we decided to make innovative and fun check-up appointments available during holidays for Children so that mums, dads, and guardians can bring their children as it suits them around their work and demanding, busy lifestyle to make sure that they're encouraged in a friendly, bright, and kind environment to look after their teeth for the rest of their lives.

One of the things we'll do with the Total Care Club moving forward is to promote, encourage, and inspire children to look after their teeth forever through many different means in many different ways because preventing tooth loss and disease is enormously cheaper and enormously better than fixing it after the problems have occurred.

Now, we can adopt this philosophy, and we have, in fact, adopted it since the very start of The Campbell Clinic as an organisation, in the way that we guarantee our treatments, but we guarantee them linked to maintenance appointments with our hygiene team to make sure people are encouraged to look after their mouths as much as possible.

There is no such thing in dentistry (or healthcare) as something we fit and forget.

I would encourage you to read Outlive by Peter Attia, if only to examine your own life, habits, and how you look after yourself for the longer term.

As I've stated to many people many times, my intention is to work until I'm 85. Of course, that comes with the caveat that I will need to be well enough to do so.

Social Legacy

In this newsletter, I always share a little bit about the things that we're doing in our practice for our social legacy projects.

As always, we have many things going on, but I'd like to tell you about three things in this little September newsletter.

On Sunday, September 15th, we will compete as a team in the Dragon Boat Race in Newark to raise money for the Children's Bereavement Centre (one of our main partner charities).

This will be a riot for all of us.

I can assure you now that we will not win anything in Dragon Boat Racing, but we will have great fun and raise as much as we can for the Children's Bereavement Centre. This charity is very close to our hearts for various reasons and circumstances that have happened to our team members and patients.

If you'd like to support us with anything that you can (it all goes straight to them), the link is here.

Secondly, we're running a conference for our dental colleagues later this year in November. 

The conference is called Learning from Failure, and it's where we openly discuss things that have gone wrong, mistakes, and problems both inside and outside of our dental professional lives. We hope that we can all be honest and open and learn from our mistakes to make things better for everyone in the future.

Our keynote speaker at this conference is actually Eddie the Eagle (the actual Eddie the Eagle), who will talk about overcoming difficulties, failures, and problems in his life story.

It will be a wonderful opportunity for us to get together on a Saturday, and it's a not-for-profit (Money to charity) conference. 

Finally, on the same day as our Learning from Failure Conference will be The Campbell Clinic Charity Ball for the eighth edition.

This will be a charity event in Nottingham for up to 200 people, raising money for all our partner charities.

So far, our charity ball activities have raised well in excess of £100,000 and we hope to raise more money at this ball again for our chosen charities.

All of this stuff, together with our 1% of turnover to social legacy projects, continues to hopefully show the greater community what we are about and what values we have. 

Finally, as always, we're here if you need us.

We have invested a lot of money, time, and effort in trying to make the first patient contact at our practice friendly, kind, honest, and informative.

We have a group of treatment coordinators in the practice led by Laura, who will be able to chat with anyone who might need our help, be it you or your family or your friends, and just to talk them through possible options for treatment and ways of entering the practice to get care, whether it's through The Campbell Clinic Total Care Club or whether it's direct for dental treatment that you or your loved ones might need.

If you have any issues or problems, I would encourage you to phone and speak to them in the first instance with absolutely no obligation.

Following on from Keir Starmer's interview yesterday it's hard to believe that things in NHS dentistry are going to get better any time soon.

I think for many of us, the harsh reality is we will have to access our care outside of that service, and the capacity outside of that service seems to get more and more limited.

Enjoy your early autumn. The nights are fair drawing, and it won't be long before here and everywhere else, we'll be talking about Christmas. 

With my best wishes and always great thanks, Colin.