Students

What time do you usually get up on a weekday?
6.00am or 5.10am if I am travelling to London to teach.

How far away from work do you live?
I live 7 miles away from the practice where I work for four days a week.

What do you eat for breakfast?
Usually cereal (home-made muesli) with fruit juice.

What are your favourite areas of dentistry and what do you find most challenging?
The most challenging area of dentistry is being able to determine what the expectations of the patient are and to communicate what the challenges are in being able to achieve those expectations.

However, once an understanding has been gained, the patient becomes a friend during treatment and this makes for an enjoyable relationship.

Is there any one patient who has most stood out for you during your career so far?
I will always remember my first ever restoration (MO amalgam on LL4), as will the patient! There have been many memorable patients, but a patient advised me yesterday that I had changed his life.

Being a dentist and being able to change people’s lives is a privilege and extremely rewarding.

Do you express an interest in business? Do you think there is enough in the dental curriculum about the business side of running a dental business?
I do not consider myself to be a natural businessman, but there is, of course, a business element to providing dental care. I have owned and run a large practice and have acquired business skills through this. I now work as an associate which allows me to focus on the patient care aspect of dentistry.

At present the curriculum does not include the business side of dentistry, and it is difficult to see what would be dropped to allow this to be taught in any detail.

Those with a natural business acumen will also probably not benefit from this teaching.

Tell us more about your longer-term ambitions. What do you see yourself doing in five years?
I enjoy teaching and this has allowed me many opportunities to travel and make new friends. However, I continue to enjoy meeting and providing dental care for a wide variety of patients.

I therefore hope to continue with both of these roles and look forward to working with colleagues to introduce and develop new concepts and innovations in fields such as MI dentistry and digital dentistry in my teaching and clinical work.

It is always exciting to see what opportunities arise and I am sure there will be something new happening within the next five years to keep me enthused and innervated.

What did you find most challenging during your undergraduate studies and what pieces of advice would you give to younger students now entering the profession?
The most challenging aspect of undergraduate education was to be able to balance the study required with being able to enjoy life as a student in London.
There is always something else to read and study, and it takes a lot of organisation and discipline to time manage effectively.

I think this remains a big challenge for any student entering the profession and as such I have always found it useful to list jobs for the day, the week, the month, and ambitions for the coming year and five-year period. By setting goals then we can make achievements.

I think it is a good time to be entering the profession as there are many new concepts and innovations that enable us to plan and deliver effective healthcare to patients, based on the oral cavity but being of benefit to the whole person.

The financial challenges of being an undergraduate student are much greater today than when I was a student, and the financial challenges of being a dentist are also different.

However, dentistry still provides a good living and everyone needs a dentist.

What do you believe will be the biggest changes we face in dentistry over the next 20 years?
I believe there will be a much greater emphasis on patient centred healthcare, i.e. enabling the patient to monitor and affect their own healthcare on a daily basis by the application of new technologies and monitoring devices.

However, there will always be the need for an appropriately trained professional to use the data gathered to reach a diagnosis, design an effective health care plan, and intervene to restore or repair damage that has occurred as a result of a disease process.

Digital technology will also assist us in recording and planning restorative care making this more predictable and reproducible. The main challenge facing all healthcare providers however is how this will be funded in the future and how much society is willing to pay to make appropriate healthcare accessible to all.

Once home in the evenings what do you do to relax?
I enjoy a good book (crime thrillers), a good television drama series, and spending time with family and friends.