In 2020 the Society of British Dental Nurses looked at meaningful and purposeful ways of increasing the workforce. The obvious matters of salary, being valued, respected, recognised and given a greater degree of autonomy all raised their head, but where do we start in reality. We know there are some things within our gift to influence and change and other things we have no control over.
Looking at ways of increasing the workforce was clearly going to be a challenging task. So the Society looked to work on two strands initially:
1) Attracting experienced dental nurses back to the profession and
2) Raising the profile of the profession within schools and Colleges. The Society already attend some school careers days and are always invited back.
Nothing surprised us more than teachers and students not being aware of the professional groups within dentistry and the opportunities there are. These days were always enjoyable but like everything else the pandemic slowed this work down. In terms of the ‘return to practice’ programme, the pandemic gave us the opportunity to really fine tune the progamme outline and pick up on vital conversations to get this off the ground. Through social media it was easy to see that there was interest.
There a number of points to schedule in, such as restoration to the register (if this is applicable), enhanced continual professional development, clinical competence and indemnity to mention but a few. These are exciting and innovative times and we need to think outside the box, if you are interested in our work or the framework get in touch and if you are a practice owner or manager who would be willing to support the programme we would like to hear from you. We are delighted to see HEE are now looking at this work too, we can all play our part.