Making The Dream Work!

Making The Dream Work!

17 April 2019

Hi everyone!

I hope you’ve all had a fabulous last couple of weeks – I can’t believe we’re now halfway through April with Easter already upon us! Bring on the extra-long bank holiday weekend (and chocolate!!) – I think we’ve all earned it!

If you’ve followed the blog at all, you might remember that, while I can’t class myself as a running enthusiast, I do try and get out on a Saturday morning and go to my local Parkrun. Well I am delighted (and relieved) to tell you that I have officially, FINALLY, run my 50th 5K with them!
I’d love to say that the run was a blinder – that I nailed a new PB, and that I went through the finish surrounded by hundreds of other runners in a true blaze of glory…but in reality, I finished with my Mum and my Husband, in just under 50 minutes, looking like a hot, sweaty mess lugging a 32 week pregnant bump around with me. My own unique blaze of glory if you will.
Nevertheless – it was my target, I persevered, and I achieved it. I hate giving up when I want to accomplish something, and I genuinely would have crawled that course if it had come to it. I am now considering myself officially on maternity leave from Parkrun! (I’d like to say that I’ll enjoy my lie-in on a Saturday morning, but baby likes to practice gymnastics around the 7am mark, so…)

While I might have finished running, the blogging stratosphere and The Briars are still stuck with me until I venture off on real maternity leave! I’ll be working until I’m around 37 weeks, so there’s still plenty of time for me to put the world to rights with you all! 😊

We’ve had a really hectic time at The Briars over the past few weeks, mostly due to our recent CQC inspection. If you’ve not heard of the CQC, it stands for ‘Care Quality Commission’ – and they are the independent regulator of all health and social care services in England. As I explained to my Mum, who works in a school – they are essentially our version of Ofsted. They come in, sometimes unannounced, and check that we are keeping up to standards they set for us – they then go away, analyse what they have seen, send us a report, then publish it for the public to see.
I’ve now worked through two CQC inspections, in two different dental practices, and they always manage to cause a world of unnecessary panic and worry. It’s a bit like when you’re driving along and you spot the police in your mirror – you immediately worry that you’re doing something wrong, even though everything you’re doing is spot on. The Briars is such a well-run, high standard practice (I know I’m biased, but I thought it even before I worked here, I swear!) – that I knew we had nothing to worry about. We have had a few minor tweaks and adjustments to make following the report (one of them being to provide reading glasses for patients…) – but overall, it was an excellent report, and it reflected the hard work we do here.
I’m sure it’s much the same with the rest of the working world, but an awful lot of the work we do in a dental practice happens behind the scenes. Every product we have in the building has a file attached to it, from the hand soap in the bathroom, to the filling materials we place. Every process we do has a policy attached to it, every policy is audited, and every audit is acted on. It’s hard work, but it’s part of what we love to do!

I hope you all have a fantastic Easter weekend – rumour has it that the sun is meant to shine, so make sure you get your fill of Vitamin D (and chocolate…)!

Amy x