Opening doors

I am very passionate about whole-team working, creating opportunities for every member of the dental team, and ensuring that we all have equal opportunities to grow and develop our skills in whatever direction we wish to take them. So, in order to help facilitate this and open doors for us all I am constantly being the proverbial pain in the butt to anyone I come across who is offering training that I think may be of interest to the dental team, and, of course, especially for those of us who are non-dentist team members.

I often get feeble excuses from organisations offering leadership training, fellowships and so on as to why their training isn’t suitable for non-dentists, and I challenge those responses as often as I can. So, when I saw the Healthcare Leadership Academy (HLA) scholarship opportunity advertised and saw that its language was once again written in such a way as to be aiming itself solely at clinicians and medical professionals, I immediately challenged this, as I saw no reason at all as to why the programme should just be for clinical applicants from the medical or dental field. To my complete surprise and delight they immediately apologised, asked me what need to be changed to correct their error and took immediate action to change their language to ensure that the opportunity is open for anyone with the right personality characteristics and desire to be an effective leader in whatever field they may work in within the healthcare professions.