February Update from The Campbell Clinic 

This little piece of writing maps the first newsletter back after I had my January sabbatical for the 7th time from around the 23rd of December until about the 4th of February.

In 2017, I decided to take time off work and see whether the work would survive without me being there. The truth is that it thrives and gets better, and when I return in February now after my time away, I wonder whether or not I'm a roadblock instead of someone who enhances the work overall, but they're still letting me come back at the moment, so I'll still continue to write.

The truth is I don't have January off at all, as my wife would tell you, and in fact, I work at least as hard in January as I do in any other time of the year, but I just don't come into the practice, and I don't see patients, and that's quite an extraordinary thing.

The ability to do that is a huge privilege, but it also allows you to look at things from a much different perspective than that of someone who has his nose to the grindstone day after day without seeing any part of the bigger picture.

This year, as part of a long-planned process, we decided to have a day on practice strategy towards the end of January as a senior leadership group, including a non-executive advisory director who helps us out with business direction.

I was able to plan that day quite extensively, and also, as a last-minute surprise, I was invited to speak at the Bupa Dental conference in South Wales in January, which gave me a totally different perspective of how other people are looking at dentistry and what they think will happen.

For example, the general manager of Bupa provided a lecture and an introduction to the congress on how Bupa sees dentistry moving forward in the future, and this is very interesting to frame against everything else you see from different sources.

The truth about dentistry, though, is that it is in difficulty at the present time, and we all know the reasons for this.

NHS Funding

If you have any aspect of NHS funding, your compliance is increasing and becoming more onerous, and your profit margins are shrinking.

If you look at the doctors and dentists review body recommendations, and then what was actually provided backdated late as a dental pay rise in the NHS this will cause significant problems and difficulties to people's bottom line.

It's harder to provide NHS dentistry at the quality and level of service you want for the money you're getting, which drives things down.

The workforce issue

This may be easing off, but it's still difficult to get associate dentists who match your values and the quality that you want to provide, who don't want to be paid the earth and break your business.

Team members

It's very difficult to find people who are committed and resilient enough to last through the real emotional and personal difficulties that being a dental workforce member can bring.

It's one of the hardest jobs you can do, and it's often much easier to go somewhere else to get paid a similar amount of money for working for less. It takes a particular type of person to be committed to dentistry the way we would likethem to be.

Patients

Are there enough patients out there who want to access the type of dentistry that you want to provide, and how do you do that?

It's difficult to find them, to talk to them about what they can have, and to explain to them the value of the work that you're providing when the money that they have in their pocket is being pulled in so many different directions in a country that seems to be struggling more and more to stay afloat at the level that it used to exist.

So, from that point of view, the external view of dentistry is gloomy, but that's not the view from inside The Campbell Clinic as we continue to grow. January 31st is our end of year, and yet again, we've managed to push 8 to 10% growth on the whole of the Clinic and now move to 50 members of the team, having just appointed another new dentist (an extraordinary young woman from Northern Ireland).

We're always massively paranoid and always expecting to be hitting the buffers any minute, and that may well be the case for 2025, but the outlook for us doesn't seem to be like that, and we do this, I think, by just continuing to add the best possible experience for patients and services that we can possibly offer and hope that continues to win.

We also very strongly believe that we're part of the whole local dental community and want to be as big a part of this as possible. In the last newsletter that I wrote in December to our GDP colleagues, I explained that we were providing 21 free access CPD experiences through the Clinic and the Academy in 2025.

Two of these have already happened, including a Dentistry Live with one of our dentists, Maria Fernandez, introducing the ClearCorrect system of clear aligners provided by Straumann. 

This is a fascinating concept because we know as dental practitioners that Invisalign has been the market leader in these areas, but we also know how expensive they are and how they have gotten to the point where they were less and less interested in their customers.

ClearCorrect offers us a huge viable alternative to provide excellent solutions for our patients in a way that can work for everyone.

Last week, we also had a fantastic team event where we provided photography, treatment coordination, dental nursing, and other hacks for dental team members to come and visit and enjoy the Clinic and the surroundings, as well as some good food and some great company.

It was hugely well received and attended, and we will continue to work on the team events that we have at the Clinic, which are free for our referring practitioners and for the local dental community, as much as we can.

If you're interested in this, you can click here. The extraordinary brochure that the team put together for the events that we have this year is still really valid because there are still 19 events coming.

We have a compliance evening with Pat Langley on the 19th of March and then an employment law for dentists on the 14th of May with Sarah Buxton. That is a particularly interesting event, particularly for associates and principals, as the change in the dental contracts that are coming is massive and will impact everyone.

My long-term friend and now chief dental officer for England, Jason Wong, will give a talk on the future of the NHS on the 16th of July. 

Then, on the 24th of September, one of the most inspirational young dentists in the world, Maja Chmielewska, is travelling to us from Gdańsk in Poland to provide a grandstand evening on digital guided surgery and planning for implant dentistry. This is beneficial for everyone to see what's possible and to see one of the most inspirational dentists in the world at our own Clinic

Together with this, we have our Dentistry Live events and our ITI study club events. Everything's listed on the brochure, and you can click to view more details here. 

The purpose of this is to get us all together, to use all this technology to make us more human and to get us to a place where we can talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly, honestly and without fear of retribution. 'A problem shared is a problem halved', we all know this, and 'all problems exist in the absence of a good conversation'. 

So come and see us anytime you like to see what's going on at our place. We'd love to connect and introduce you to the dental buying group to save you as much money as possible on your dental material bills on a monthly basis through our partner, Wrights, to help you when times are difficult, and the credit crunch squeezes.