All clinicians will recognise the importance of life-long learning, both as a means of revalidation with the General Dental Council and as a means to grow and progress in your career. This learning can take many forms, and doesn’t just have to include formal qualifications. It can for example include making it a habit to regularly read articles in the dental press, or to take part in webinars and other sources of online learning. Study days are also a useful form of learning, while some academies, manufacturers or individuals also offer their own training courses to help you gain new knowledge and new skills.
To ensure dental professionals continue this ethos of ‘life long learning’ the GDC has stipulated that clinicians complete a set amount of continuing professional development in each five-year cycle. While CPD in itself is quite a flexible term and can of course take any number of forms, there are some subjects that are of greater necessity than others. Typically these relate to specific health and safety issues, and consist of: medical emergencies; disinfection and decontamination; and radiography and radiation protection.
There can be no denying the importance of these three areas, and it is for this reason in particular that dental professionals should seek to attend courses in these areas on a regular basis, with refresher training at suitable intervals. All too often courses can seem dull and uninspiring, and the problem that many professionals cite for lack of interest here is down to the quality of the course provider, and not the subject itself.
Another problem which often arises is that many dental professional, in particular hygienists, therapists and nurses, are asked to front the cost of much of their CPD learning. Either that, or for compulsory ‘core’ topics, practice managers will arrange a group session from the cheapest provider that can be found.
While financial prudence is certainly not a bad trait, there are many training providers still on the market today who offer cost effective training options that are of a surprisingly high standard.
As anyone who has ever attended a dental course of any kind will know, for a course to be a success, the material really needs to be presented in an interesting and engaging way. The more relevant and interesting a course is, the more likely the course content is to ‘sink in’, and delegates will come away from the course armed with the knowledge and skills to put their recent learning to good use.
When selecting a training provider then, quality of content is key, and it is important that the presenters should be experts at what they do. Lectures read from a slide are not good enough – presenters should engage with delegates and be able to offer real practical examples of points that can be applied to a dental professional’s day-to-day work.
Another key element to course selection is flexibility. Some course providers will be able to offer training conducted ‘on-site’ at your practice at a time and location convenient to you. In this modern age of dentistry, time is everything, and time spent not seeing patients is lost revenue and extra wage costs for staff. On-site training then can be a great solution as it allows you to gain CPD either on a lunch break or perhaps after work so that as little ‘patient time’ as possible is lost, and costs can be kept to a minimum. A further option that practices might like to consider is to take up training at a centralised training location. This means you can often cover more than one course in the space of a single day, or alternatively just take a single half-day option. Either way, a centralised training option can often work out far cheaper for a practice, especially for those practices that employ large teams of staff who are not necessarily all working on the same shift. Bringing the whole team together in one location, under one roof can save the hassle of arranging separate training sessions over a number of days, and can work as an excellent team-building exercise and a good way of building relations between team members.
All dental professionals will recognise the importance of life-long learning and the relevant CPD hours that are mandatory under the GDC. While learning is compulsory, it doesn’t have to be boring; nor indeed does it have to be inflexible or expensive.