At 06:00hrs I hit the road to head up to Liverpool, it's lovely to leave the house in the semi-light. The car journey is over 3 hours from Gloucestershire to Liverpool, so I listened to episodes from my favourite podcast to help the journey go quickly. I catch up with the sport from the weekend, followed by a couple of episodes of Happy Place and a good giggle listening to a former student of mine, Claire Berry (and Benjamin Tighe) in Your Dental Besties interspersed with some Cody Johnson bangers. I do love a long drive to have time for some listening and to create a bit of head space.
Today I am delivering our Year 3 Module 'Preparing for Practice' to the Year 3 BSc and BDS students. Liverpool students do a lot of co-learning as the Year 3 Module was primarily designed for graduating student dental therapists, I made some essential amendments to ensure it was relevant to them, also giving them food for thought for when it is their turn to graduate whilst discussing 'Prevention in Perio' from the position of being in general practice.
I designed the Year 3 module around the concept of dentistry outside of university and how we can use our learned evidence base alongside our communication skills to equip patients with the 'Knowledge, Skills and Tools' to be able to maintain their own dental health. We discuss the importance of getting prevention right as well as how to build rapport, educate and motivate difficult patients. I love the interactivity of the session and hearing about tricky patients the students have encountered, and lessons learned.
During the session I also shared tips for physical and mental health and wellbeing in the clinical environment, share my own experiences of clinic and my own mental health journey where things don't always go to plan and where to gather support from including professional networks and the importance of face-to-face experiences.
Needless to say the session went well and the feedback blew me away:
- ''Really engaging. Very funny and personable. Thoroughly enjoyed. Thank you.''
- ''The speaker really loved what she did and I learned a lot, she was very inspirational.''
- ''Teaching very helpful for future practice.''
- ''Very informative, I liked the use of case studies.''
- ''Very relevant and some really good points raised regarding patient conversations.''
- ''Exceptional - Laura was in depth but fun and engaging. I wish she could give us all of our lectures.''
- ''Absolutely excellent! Please come back again.''
- ''Laura was a very passionate and motivational speaker, best perio queen!!''
- ''Laura did amazing! You can see she has a passion for dentistry - it flourishes through her presentation.''
I love that my extended clinical team and I have the opportunity to speak with and inspire future dental professionals, it feels like I am passing the baton to them now I no longer work in the clinical practice. Now working for TePe full time, I feel that I can make better use of the avaliable time to enhance the modules I have already designed and expand the programme to cover every member of the clinical dental team... look out for more new modules coming soon.