Putting the 'it' in digital

I know we are celebrating the BDJ's 150^th anniversary and I don't want to over-emphasise the historical, but the exercise of seeing where we have come from does help us measure how we might go forwards. In this issue, we publish an Opinion piece from Dickenson and co-authors on our readiness (or not) as a profession, to adopt and adapt to digital changes.¹ The authors carefully detail the definitions of digital, digitisation and so forth, which is helpful, but as a general term 'going digital' captures the gist of it for most of us. We get 'it' and 'it' is variously inconvenient, fascinating, irritating, costly, amazing, tedious, inspiring, something we really don't have capacity for just now thank you, life-changing, time-saving, not likely to kick in until we retire, essential, or any number of other reactions depending on our state of mind and current feelings. But going digital will be the future whether we like it or not and the sooner we embrace that fact the likelihood is that 'it' will make our lives less stressful, which probably also means 'better'.

I am reminded of so many such previous apparent impasses. Hands up who can remember doubting whether the internet would catch on or if it was just a plaything for geeks? No takers? Then, who will admit to shunning broadband as the in situ dial-up option was quite good enough for the purpose? Whoever imagined only a handful of years ago that digital cameras could serve a place in dental treatment? That digital impressions could be a practical reality and that, even now, 3D-printed dentures would be added to that same electronic-mediated workflow? You get my point.

On a wider note, the mainstream media seem intent on finding any angle at all to question and often to rubbish technological change; for example, with electric vehicles. Nonsense articles claim that they aren't safe (they are amongst if not the safest on the road), their range rules out everyday use (the average car journey in the UK is around eight miles), there will never be a lorry with a big enough battery to use for long distances (they already exist). The reality is that the UK government, and many others around the world, have mandated a phase down, and out, of internal combustion engines for various dates in the coming years. It will happen. Technology will refine the electric choices in the meanwhile and by say, 2040, we will all be driving them and will wonder, like dial-up internet, how we ever imagined that anything other than electric would even enter our consciousness. We all find change difficult and bewildering.

Having written that, I accept that some of this needs caution and a lot of it needs careful consideration especially in relation to providing patient care. Inevitably included in this, because of the mode of delivery of dental care in so many systems, is also the adaptation of business processes. Shifting from metal or plastic trays with gooey alginate to digital scanning means changes in ordering consumables, organising stock, disposing of unwanted equipment, training team members in new techniques (influencing altered teaching curricula), explaining innovations to patients, finding appropriate technical support, getting our heads around the nuances of the techniques.

Hands up who can remember doubting whether the internet would catch on

In a recent BBC television documentary sharing hitherto unshown footage of the private life of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II to celebrate her Platinum Jubilee, she made a remark which struck me as so wise. Based on her 70 years on the throne, she said that in her experience nothing stays the same for very long. If this is true for the monarchy, then it is certainly a pertinent observation for us all too. While reflecting on the longer-term changes since 1952, I think she was also commenting on life in general and on a much shorter time scale. Certainly nothing in dentistry stays the same for very long, and even excluding the monstrous upheaval of the coronavirus pandemic, the pace of development in so many aspects that touch our service to patients has been breathtaking.

In this, I am fascinated by the views and outlooks of our younger colleagues. I think they are shaping up to embrace changes and incorporate the vagaries of the current world into their view of now, and their futures. For them, the nine-to-five, full working week in a solitary surgery for a lifetime is no longer any sort of option. For them, work-life balance is not some fancy term coined by human resource psychologists but a real-world given; innovation is to be expected and explored, and in many circumstances embraced and shared. For colleagues of a certain age, this is a greater ask but we hesitate at our peril.