This article is sponsored content brought to you by Restoring Excellence.
Monday morning. You’ve been to a course. But do you feel confident to deliver your new skills? Having trained many people in restorative and implant dentistry live patient courses, I realised that many people had done many hours of continuing education, and yet still do not feel confident to deliver what they have learnt.
Over the years, we have focussed on how to improve the safety, confidence, and competence of dentists attending our courses. We realised that dentists learning new skills need a lot of repetitions and hours spent training their hand and eye. No amount of theoretical knowledge gives skill. Only time spent doing does.
Would you feel comfortable with a new pilot who had read thousands of articles about flying? Or would you prefer a pilot with tens of thousands of hours spent flying or in simulators?
We decided to apply the aviation training model to dentistry to give those learning much better confidence, better skills, better safety for patients, and as a side benefit, better value for money.
To achieve this we re-engineered how we trained dentists.
We realised that most courses sold as hands on, are mostly theoretical lectures with hands on exercises only occupying a small percentage of the time. To overcome this obstacle, we moved our entire theoretical series online. The feedback from attendees has been overwhelmingly positive. Not only has this reduced travel and accommodation costs, it has allowed the dentists to watch the theory as many times as they like to understand the concepts.
Using the latest tracking technology, we can offer verified CPD for this and we believe that the learning experience is generally superior to live lectures.
This has also freed up time so that hands-on training is 100% hands-on. When they attend our hands-on courses, they do hands-on for seven to eight hours a day straight, for the same cost as traditional hands-on courses!
There are so many benefits to doing this. It’s way better value. But more importantly, it increases the number of repetitions that are achieved by three to four fold, and more importantly creates better conditions to train in human factor (more about this soon).
For example, in our posterior hands on, dentists will do around 20 indirect preps in a day and a half. The improvement in quality doing this number in such a short time is almost breathtaking! From 90% of dentists giving us preps with undercuts, to everyone having appropriate taper and smooth margins in less than two days. It takes repetitions to build confidence.
More importantly, when you do this much hands-on, you get tired. And this far better simulates the experience you have when at the end of a long appointment, you get a bubble in your impression and you have to retake it. It trains you to do great work even when you are fatigued!
So if you would like a restorative course that will genuinely improve your skills, and confidence, join the restorative continuum next year (or the following year if it is sold out).
For more, see restoringexcellence.com.au.
