Consultant in Special Care Dentistry, Clinical Director for Dentaid, the dental charity, and Chair of the British Dental Association’s Young Dentist Committee, Natalie Bradley shares some advice for dentists in the early stages of their career.
Young dentists are joining the profession during a time where working patterns are changing. People no longer want necessarily to work nine to five Monday to Friday in one place anymore. They might work a couple of days here or there. They may even have their own business doing something else on the side or it might be they work three days a week and that’s all they need to do. This is just the way things are going where people are balancing a portfolio career so that they are dedicating enough time to the things they are doing.
Personally, I have found that quite a challenge sometimes with all the roles I have. I’ve come to realise over time that just because you have more roles, it doesn’t mean that you’re a better person. You need to be able to dedicate enough time to each of the roles that you have, otherwise you’re at risk of doing a bad job at something.
Set boundaries and take breaks
These days it’s important to try to have boundaries. We’re all on call 24 7 now because you can pick up your smartphone and check your emails first thing in the morning and last thing at night, which I’m probably guilty of doing too often. You need to have boundaries that this is the day I’m working at this place, this is the day I’m doing this, and after that I’m switching off. This is so important for your mental health, because blurring your boundaries affects your work-life balance. If you’re constantly on call, constantly working, your mind can’t rest, and you can’t switch off.
As well as having clear boundaries, making sure you take enough breaks is something I would recommend highly. I think my first year I collated all my annual leave and left them to the end of the year and then I was just worn out! You have annual leave for a reason, so make sure you take sufficient breaks.
Find and maintain your tribe
Probably the best career advice I could give people earlier in their career is to find people who share the same values as you and then keep in touch with them as mentors. So, people who have the same values as you won’t mind if you drop them a message every so often to ask how they would deal with a particular situation and suggest meeting up for a coffee to chat about it.
Finding and keeping in touch with the people who you connect with is very important. I can still drop my foundation trainer, from when I did my first year as a dentist 10 years ago, a message every so often and go and visit him. If I need an emergency reference, he’s always there as well. And then we go to personal life events with each other. So that’s when you’ll feel fulfilment and they’ll help you throughout your career. Even if you go down a completely different route from them, they will be able to share advice or put you in touch with the people that they know. So, it’s about finding your crowd.
Support others
I think it’s really important to support others. If I hear of something that didn’t go well for someone who I’m close with, I want to do something about it. It infuriates me when you see a dentist, probably quite early on in their career, who’s had a bad experience with someone supervising them or another dentist. And that really affects people when they’re in the early stages of their career because they don’t have much experience.
There are quite a few people I’ve trained in my hospital job now who tell me they chose to do a hospital training job, because they hated working in practice. When I ask them what happened, the answer is often, ‘I had a really bad foundation trainer.’ That experience has then tainted their whole perception of working in a dental practice for them, when it might not necessarily be about dental practice itself. That one interaction and that specific practice has put them off. Whereas, if they found the right practice and the right mentors, they could probably flourish. So, mentorship and helping support people is extremely important.
The future
Looking to the future, technology is going to play a big part in dentistry. There are lots of things that we can do remotely now that would be great and mean you don’t physically have to be in your dental practice every day of the week. I do a remote consultation clinic as part of my job once a month, which is handy for certain patients, and that technology really benefits certain people. It’s also great for your own work life balance. If you don’t have to physically go to work on your remote consultation day, you can do that from home or from a location that’s closer to you.
This then brings us back to boundary setting. If you can check your patient notes and your patient list at 12 o’clock the night before, should you really do that? So, it’s important to be careful and also be responsible. With technology advancing, this is all very exciting, but we don’t necessarily know how some things might be misused. While it’s great we can use AI, we can’t say how things will go if it goes wrong. So, it’s important to be aware of that and of things such as confidentiality, sharing of information, and making sure that everything’s tip top.
Dentistry is a very fulfilling career. We can get very caught up and focus on the nitty gritty of, ‘I’m doing this treatment for this patient’. However, it’s important to remember what that treatment means to that person. If you can get them out of pain, think how grateful they would be or if you fix their front tooth and make them able to smile again. These are the things that should get you out of bed in the morning. Also, these are the things that we should be valuing as a profession.
Leave a Reply