Would you recommend a career in Dentistry to a member of your family?
At the moment, probably not!
Why so?
Because its rotten! Beset by problems.
And yet dentistry should be a great career and should be more attractive now than it used to be, with technical advances like implants and digital dentistry.
So what’s gone wrong?
Lots has gone wrong, but much of it relates to how we interact with each other. We buy our practices and they become the focus of almost all our professional attention. That’s understandable as running a practice is demanding, but:
- We start to lose contact with our peers
- We start to see our peers as competitors rather than colleagues
- We’re so busy with the practice and our personal commitments that we forget to take an interest in and support our representative bodies
- When we’re not happy, we hope someone else will fix it
- The representative bodies have so little support they become ‘toothless’ (sorry!)
- The terms get worse, we get more apathetic and more focused on our own problems
- The vicious cycle repeats
In the immortal words of Bob the Builder ‘Can we fix it, yes we can’.
- To restore our profession to good health we must change the way we see each other. We must rediscover the friendships of our university years and connect with our colleagues. We must support each other as fellow professionals doing a difficult and demanding job.
- We must look beyond our own worlds and take in the bigger picture
- We must each take responsibility for the health of our profession
- We must support our representative bodies
- We must rediscover our pride and our self-confidence as a profession
- We must unite
SDPO seeks to unite Scottish practice owners, the key stakeholders in Scottish Dentistry.
This should be a powerful group with strong representation, and we believe this should include legal support. With your support we can tackle the issues facing our profession.
We are reasonable people and will make reasonable demands, but we will challenge behaviour that we think harms the interests of our members and the public that we serve.
We spend our working lives restoring things. Please support us in restoring our profession to good health.
Dentistry should be a career that you would recommend to your kids.