The Monday Morning Quote #191

“To believe in something, and not to live it, is dishonest.”

Mahatma Gandhi

The Planning Your Ideal Retirement Programme

A couple of informative videos from Ray Prince & Graeme Urwin at Rutherford Wilkinson – applications for the Planning Your Ideal Retirement Programme open today, Thursday 15th November.

Here’s the first www.planningyouridealretirement.com/pyir2012video1pc

& the second www.planningyouridealretirement.com/pyir2012video2

To learn more talk to Ray or Graham www.medicaldentalfs.com/contact-u

Mission Statements and more

I ask my clients as individuals and businesses to devise their own mission statements. This is a worthwhile exercise to help them get clear exactly what it is they are trying to achieve.

In addition I get them to devise clear statements; not only “what you expect from us” but also “what we expect from you”. It’s a two way street and it’s important that both sides understand the deal.

Here’s one I came across from the folks at The Rosemount Dental Clinic in Aberdeen that does the job beautifully. It’s clear and concise and there’s no ifs, buts or maybes.

Here’s the weblink www.aberdeencosmeticdentistry.co.uk/index/mission-statement

Mission Statement

  • Our aim is to create happy, healthy, beautiful smiles.

Promises and expectations

We promise to:

  • Welcome you into a caring and professional environment.
  • Listen with respect and respond to your concerns.
  • Clearly state the cost of proposed dental treatment in advance.
  • Do our absolute level best to keep to time.
  • Perform our very best standard of dental work for you at all times.
  • Guarantee our dental work for a minimum of twelve months.
  • Make no charges for appointments changed or cancelled where 24 hours notice has been given.

We appreciate your commitment to:

  • Arrive in time for your appointments.
  • Follow our instructions to care for the work we provide.
  • Attend review and maintenance appointments as advised.
  • Pay for treatment as requested. We accept cash, personal and business cheques and most credit and debit cards.
  • We also offer interest free credit.
  • Talk to us, let us know what you think of what we do: right and wrong.
  • Help our practice grow by recommending us to your family, friends and colleagues.

The Monday Morning Quote #190

“The difference between a successful person and others Is not a lack of strength,
Not a lack of knowledge,
But rather a lack of will.”

– Vince Lombardi

The Monday Morning Quote #189

“Most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.“

Abraham Lincoln

Back training places call, young dentists urge.

In the wake of the DFT fiasco comes a call from young dentists. I am assured that the only reason there weren’t more places is because the DoH wouldn’t releases funds. One thing strikes me as odd when dentists leave the NHS the figure that their training has cost “the taxpayer” is frequently quoted as £250,000; when the cock up is down to the DoH the figure is £150,000 – no mention is made of the money that comes from the families of the students nor of the severe debt that the students bear. Nor is any mention of the sheer waste of manpower that this has caused.

PR44.12

17 October 2012

Back training places call, young dentists urge

Young dentists are calling for support for their demand for Government to guarantee all graduates from UK dental schools a Dental Foundation Training (DFT) place. The demand comes in the British Dental Association’s (BDA’s) newly-published YDC Asks, a mini-manifesto for young dentists developed by the organisation’s Young Dentists Committee (YDC).

The Committee is asking those who support it to sign a Government e-petition founded by YDC Chair Dr Martin Nimmo. The petition argues that the failure to allocate DFT places to UK graduates both wastes taxpayers’ money invested in their training, because denying each individual a DFT place means that they are prevented from providing NHS care, and is unfair to the graduates who taken on significant amounts of debt in order to complete their studies.

The launch of the petition follows a recent admission by the Department of Health (DH) that 35 UK graduates from the 2011 cohort have not been allocated DFT places. Each graduate, DH acknowledged, will have cost the public purse approximately £150,000 to train.

Dr Martin Nimmo, Chair of the BDA’s Young Dentists Committee, said:

“It is perverse that students who have strived hard to pursue a career in NHS care are being denied the training places they need to fulfil that ambition. This is a significant waste of taxpayers’ money, and a tragedy for the graduates who have taken on large amounts of debt in pursuing their vocation. Given that there are some areas of the UK where patients who wish to access NHS care cannot do so, it is also nonsensical.

“I urge all current and potential members of the profession, and taxpayers, to join young dentists in calling for a guarantee that this farcical situation will never be allowed to happen again.”

YDC Asks also expresses concerns that robust data should be used in workforce planning, that barriers to young dentists becoming practice owners are mounting and that careers in dental academia and specialist training must remain viable options for young dentists.

Ends

Notes to Editors

The BDA Young Dentists Committee represents practitioners up to 12 years post-graduation from all spheres of dentistry and across the UK and Northern Ireland.
The British Dental Association (BDA) is the professional association for dentists in the UK. It represents 23,000 dentists working in general practice, in community and hospital settings, in academia and research, and in the armed forces, and includes dental students.
For further information, please contact the BDA’s media team on 0207 563 4145/46 or visit www.bda.org/news-centre/. You can also follow news from the BDA on Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/TheBDA.

The Monday Morning Quote #188

“Originality is the art of concealing your sources.”

Unknown

Thanks to Dixie Dynamite

I do wish I had said that #6

Michael Watson writing in Dentistry nails the subject.

Can governments be trusted with commissioning?

Michael Watson questions why commissioning remains the cornerstone to provision of healthcare across the NHS including dentistry.

The fiasco over West Coast Main Line rail franchise raises questions of whether ministers or civil servants can be trusted with commissioning projects in the future. Alasdair Palmer writing in the Daily Telegraph described it as ‘the latest in a long line of blunders in the way the state awards contracts to private companies.’

The Department of Health is not immune from this, remember the project to modernise the NHS computer systems, abandoned after £12 billion had been spent and wasted. Yet commissioning remains the cornerstone to provision of healthcare across the NHS including dentistry.

Indeed in its response to the recent Office of Fair Trading report, the government once again committed itself the principle of commissioning NHS primary dental care, with all such decisions being vested in a central mammoth NHS Commissioning Board.

Locally decisions will guided by advice from professional networks, with the added possibility of ‘jobs for friends’, maybe even brown envelopes stuffed with cash.

The rail franchise was initially awarded on the (inaccurate) basis of the winner being cheapest, not on whether it could provide a better service for passengers. The experience in dentistry over the past six years is that dental contracts are awarded to the cheapest, not those that will deliver the best patient experience.

What will happen when Sir Richard Branson in the form of Virgin Healthcare challenges a decision of the NHS Commissioning Board in the courts? Will it expose the flimsy basis on which NHS commissioning is based?

Of course until 2006 patients could choose which dentist to attend and what treatment to have. They were at the centre, but this, of course, robs the bureaucrats of their power and cannot be tolerated in the new world of the NHS.

The Monday Morning Quote #187

Cassius:
“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves,”

William Shakespeare
Julius Caesar
(I, ii, 140-141)

The Greatest Breakthrough Since Lunchtime #6 – The Canary System

From The Ontario Ministry of Economic Development and Innovation

A Toronto Success Story

Quantum Dental Technologies
A Quantum Leap For Dental Care

Drilling and filling cavities could soon be a thing of the past thanks to revolutionary new technology developed by Toronto dentist Stephen Abrams and U of T engineer Andreas Mandelis.

Called The Canary System, the technology uses light waves and can find cavities even before they show up on x-rays. The system is safe, non-invasive and painless – and lets dentists halt decay by using pastes or gels to remineralize teeth.

“This really is breakthrough technology,” says Abrams, now president of Quantum Dental Technologies, the company he and Mandelis formed to develop and manufacture the system.

With The Canary System, a dentist uses a handheld laser that emits a low-power light to examine tooth surfaces. The system measures the amount of light and heat emitted from each tooth. Since healthy tooth enamel produces a specific wavelength signature, any deviations can be analyzed, and can pinpoint problems as tiny as 50 microns (half the diameter of a strand of hair) up to five millimetres below the tooth surface.

Custom reports are generated and displayed on an interactive, touch-screen monitor for immediate chairside review. They can also be downloaded onto a smartphone or personal computer, helping patients take ownership of their own oral health care.

The Canary System, which won a National Instruments Graphical System Design Achievement Award in the medical device category for 2010, is expected to be available to dentists in Canada beginning in April 2011.

For Abrams and Mandelis, bringing the technology to market has been an exciting adventure that began 10 years ago in Abrams’ dental office when Mandelis was visiting for a routine check-up.

Abrams was bemoaning the state of preventative care in dentistry. Mandelis, an expert in thermophotonics, suggested perhaps lasers could be adapted to assess oral health.

The two brought their idea to the Ontario Centres of Excellence, which got the ball rolling with start-up funding and help with product development. Along the way, the Health Technology Exchange also contributed product development expertise and funding, and MaRS provided advisory services on positioning and branding.

“These commercialization programs have been very helpful to us,” says Quantum’s vice president of corporate development, Josh Silvertown. “For those who want to use them, government resources are there. The key is to be creative and take advantage of them.”