Meeting great leaders and implementers.

I recently completed my patient care and communication programme in a practice in Kent.

I had already attended the practice and had a great deal of communication with the principals and some of the team members before the training.

The three principals are truly wonderful people. They are outstanding clinicians, each with different special interests and post-graduate qualifications. They are forward thinking positive people.

They run a huge practice. They have an implant and skin centre under development across the road. They have dentists from all over the country refer to them. They also have a wonderfully supportive team.

The team have all taken on different responsibilities. The PM has a huge responsibility with the new development as well as continuing with her existing role. She takes care of the all finances for the practice. One wonderful front desk team member has outstanding IT skills and is using them daily, for the practices benefit, preparing marketing material and configuring reports. One nurse takes full responsibility for the referral of patients. Each team member is special to the practice – I cannot mention each one and their specialist skills and asserts as there are 28 of them.

What’s more, knowing how busy the principals are with their work life balance, I am sure that this team have played a big part in the growth of the practice over the last 19 years – this team are great implementers and are clearly not resistant to change.

I am sure I will be telling this story for many years. Almost every one of the team members had been with the practice for an average of 20 years. One lady in particular is 70 years old. She is a great example of how to embrace change. On day one I taught the team new ways to deal with new patient telephone enquiries. Every member learnt this quickly and picked up the skills brilliantly, as did the eldest and most longstanding team member. If I remember correctly she has been with the practice for over 50 years!! She has a positive “I can do it ” attitude which I loved.

The associate dentists have all been with the practice for a long time too. In fact if you add every ones length of service together the combined number of years service at the practice is 510 !!

As a principal when you own a practice and have long standing team members it is a credit to your leadership and people skills.

I give great credit to the wonderful leaders and decision makers of the practice and also pass that credit on to the wonderful team I had the enjoyable opportunity to spend three days with.

Everybody in that practice most definitely put a spring in my step – it is infectious!

Laura