Blowing up

I used to intensely dislike two expressions. Now it’s three. The first two – as I may have mentioned in the past – are ‘soft skills’ and ‘check-up’. There’s nothing ‘soft’ about the skills needed to survive, let alone prosper, in today’s professional arena: leadership, management, team-work, goal setting, motivational skills, all these and more are essential skills for today’s dental professional. As for ‘check-up’ I have long found that dismissive of perhaps the most vital service provided by dentists and their teams. Someone once reckoned that you could teach a student to perform an excellent cavity preparation in two weeks, and you could probably say the same for many of our high precision tasks, but consultation and diagnosis? I, for one, am still learning after 40 years.

But there’s now an addition, a highly topical one, to my list of Room 101 terms: ‘whistle-blower’. At best, it’s an expression that has become synonymous with trial by media, gagging clauses and the blame culture that sadly pervades our society.