There’s no doubt that the pandemic took its toll on people’s mental, as well as physical health. The extra stresses and worries put a strain on a profession already renowned for being pressured, leaving many feeling burnt out and struggling.
At Practice Plan’s Dental Business Theatre at the Dentistry Show in Birmingham in May, Co-founder of Mental Health Wellness in Dentistry, Fiona Ellwood BEM, took part in a discussion hosted by Practice Plan’s Creative Director, Les Jones, on ‘How to stay mentally fit’. Here she shares her thoughts on the subject.
Les Jones: To be able to withstand additional pressure, people have been urged to become more resilient and advice and courses on how to achieve this are readily available. However, by encouraging people to become more resilient are we inadvertently pressuring them into thinking that we must all be resilient? Is there a danger that the constant drive to be resilient is forcing people to put on a brave face and carry on?
Fiona Ellwood: Yes, the constant push to become more resilient can be part of the problem for some. This is because we encourage people to hide things; to bury things almost, and to assume that they should be okay. And by all this discussion and almost forcing of resilience, to me it says you have to cope. Toughen up; pull your socks up.
There is a wonderful poem which talks about buying big girl socks or big girl pants. Not only is it sexist and gendered, but ultimately, we should be looking at what is the causative factor here? What can we do? What can we change to make this better? Not teaching somebody how to put up with it and how to face it.
LJ: Are there any tools you suggest that people can employ to help themselves?
FE: It’s a real challenge because there are lots of different indicators, and understanding what mental health illness and mental health wellness are, is really core to that answer. Whether we look at stresses, whether we look at anxieties, we really need an infrastructure to help us identify those things.
I was trained as a Mental Health First Aider (MHFA) and I really support that training, but there are other mechanisms of training available. I also lean towards the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) who have a lot of tools to deal with stress.
Obviously, I’m going to promote the Mental Health Wellness in Dentistry Framework. That’s free of charge and it’s there for everybody. It’s across all nations. It requires everybody to get hold of the practice and look at the practice strategy and to put people through the Mental Health First Aider framework. So, that ensures everybody has a basic understanding of how to manage within the team. It also involves appointing at least one mental health lead. That’s not the be all and end all, but we need that strategy in there.
The Mental Health Wellness in Dentistry Framework is an in-practice tool. Practices can take hold of it and use it as part of induction, training, CPD, appraisals, and return to work. It has many applications. And it’s a simple tool, which is what we need.
The one thing the Framework doesn’t do is make the suicide awareness training mandatory. And that’s for a reason, because the mantra of that framework is early intervention and safe signposting. And that’s because we want to catch it early, but the mental health lead in the practice is unlikely to be somebody who could be a suicide point of contact. That’s a different level of interaction, a different level of skills. So that’s an added option.
We mustn’t forget that suicide ideation happens, and we need to have those conversations. But they touch on that anyway as part of Mental Health First Aid training. So you’d have the basic skillsets to look at that, but I wouldn’t recommend that being the responsibility of the Mental Health Lead. However, I would urge you not to just say to somebody, here’s a phone number, go and make the call because if that person’s in crisis, they will not reach out. It’s so important you don’t send them away. It is a sign that they’re asking for help, and you need to take that on board and look at it and find help for them.
LJ: What about external training?
FE: There are a lot of people who jumped on the mental health bandwagon throughout the pandemic. Kindness is a wonderful thing, but you can take it down the wrong path and get people into a real mess. So, we need to be really careful who we engage with and then how we utilise those tools.
There are workshops, but I get really concerned, that in the pandemic, there were people popping up everywhere, offering their services. But they’ve got to have been trained, they’ve got to understand. It has to be the right person because the wrong ones can do more damage and harm. And that is my mantra.
LJ: Any further thoughts?
FE: I’d like to see the implementation of understanding the team. Really looking at the blank canvas of the team and instilling that into the practice and into inductions. So, we know what it is that heightens people’s sense of stress and anxiety. We know what upsets people, we know what makes things tick, whether it’s running late, whether it’s double booking for example.
But I’d also like to encourage you to think about how you induct new people into your practice. Because the new people are strangers and they don’t feel like they belong and the minute they don’t feel like they belong, you’re starting a process that will cause a problem in the future.
LJ: Thank you, Fiona.
About Fiona
Fiona Ellwood BEM is the Executive Director of the Society of British Dental Nurses. She is also the Emeritus Chair and Interim Chair of The National Oral Health Group and founder of ‘Dental Mentoring Network’ and a member of Dental Mentors UK.
She has an honorary Fellowship from the Faculty of General Dental Practitioners (UK) (the first DCP to do so) and is a former Fellow of the Faculty of Dental Trainers at the Royal College of Surgeons Edinburgh. She has fellowship recognition from the Institute of Administrators and Managers and the Royal Society of Public Health and is a member of the Chartered Institute of Ergonomics and Human Factors, is a trustee at Dentaid and supports the Mouth Cancer Foundation from an education perspective.
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