I have seen the soft campaigning in the form of opinion pieces and social media posts by dentists active in various positions in the British Dental Association (BDA) in the weeks and months before the General Dental Council (GDC) announced their new Chair to replace Dr William Moyes who is due to step down soon. The question that forms the title of this piece was running in my mind.
Since I retired a couple of years-or-so ago, I’ve had many dentistry-related dreams/nightmares. Many of these dreams find me suddenly planted back in a surgery somewhere, working on difficult patients with tricky clinical needs.
DROs
DROs
Once upon a time, as all the stories, good, and bad, start, a dental surgeon would have a chair of some sort in his (almost always his) south facing sitting room and ply his trade. George Bernard Shaw in the 1897 play “You never can tell” describes such a set up in the home of Dr Valentine, a “half crown” dentist. The half crown refers to the standard treatment fee, not his clinical technique.
It seems odd at my age, writing the words ‘Dental Hero,’ but Simon was one of them, even though he was only a handful of years older than me. Simon was my first ever dental boss, and he ran two practices, one in the Cotswolds and a newly acquired practice in a large Worcestershire town.
These days, if I get any phone call on my mobile from a number I don’t recognise, I reflexly activate the speakerphone and start the voice recorder up on my watch.I used to get quite tense and angry when I received these calls. At my own practice a few years ago, we fell victim to a scam operated by UK-based scammers. We didn’t lose much money, but that was just by pure luck.
