DTUK1010

The Royal College of Physicians, Regent’s Park, London World Class Speakers: Julian Webber, Kevin Lewis, Achim Schmidt, Eddie Lynch, Basil Mizrahi, Wyman Chan, Trevor Bigg, Jonothan Britto, Joe Omar, Seema Sharma, Bruce Bernstein ...many more to come. Go to www.clinicalinnovations.co.uk or call 020 7400 8967 The Clinical Innovations Conference 2010 | The state of the Nation Friday 7th and Saturday 8th May C M Y CM MY CY CMY K A4 lightbulb CIC advert-amended-text.pdf 1 12/04/2010 17:18:19 7News & OpinionsApril 19-25, 2010United Kingdom Edition T his has been another busy month on GDPUK, with the launch of our Dental Show Reviews site www.dental- showreviews.co.uk. This new part of the site is like ‘Trip Advi- sor’ for the present proliferation of dental exhibitions. It allows dentists, their teams and the dental trade, the exhibitors who pay for the shows, to rate events themselves, and thus provide mutual feedback. This in turn will help colleagues, and perhaps the trade, to decide which show is best for them to visit. On a more serious note, some exclusive news has already been published on the site concerning a GDC meeting held in camera, when it is usually open to the public. As secrecy was main- tained, rumours concerning what was discussed began to circulate, culminating in someone resign- ing from the GDC, and that there was a financial problem and a po- tential rise in the ARF. The truth in these matters is yet to be clari- fied, but as you can imagine this provided grist to the GDPUK mill. Surprisingly to me, the NHS dentistry pay cut announced by the Government in mid March was met with little comment on the forum. There was no rush to man the barricades. How can this be analysed? Strange but true? Of course GDPUK wouldn’t be the same without its range of little anecdotal snippets floating around its cyberspaces. For ex- ample, one asked whether sili- cone impression material could be removed from one’s clothing. Another raised the topic con- cerning the difficulty in some- times identifying an implant from the radiograph, suggesting that a national register would help. Therefore, in say 20 years, one could go there and see the make and type of implant placed. Especially amusing was the story of a patient (aged 84!) who took revenge on a dentist by leav- ing a home-made bomb outside the practice. As always, there are many topics lifting the spirits of those involved in the thread. One of these is the story of concern- ing the consolidation of the hundreds of thousands of mes- sages on GDPUK. As part of this project, a colleague will collect and collate the 100,000 messages posted on Yahoo groups, so that other colleagues can turn it into a searchable database, which will eventually be part of the present GDPUK.com site. Hopefully, this project will probably be com- plete by the time you read this. One colleague is determined the British Library shall be able to access the data for future histori- ans to consult on the way trends in UK dentistry unfolded. DT GDPUK round-up The GDPUK online community is always keen to air and share its views, and this month sees the launch of its new exhibition review section, says Tony Jacobs About the author Tony Jacobs, 52 is a GDP in the sub- urbs of Manches- ter, in practice with partner Steve La- zarus at 406Dental (www.406dental. com). He has had roles in his LDC, local BDA and with the annual confer- ence of LDCs, and is a local dental adviser for Dental Protection. Nowa- days, he concentrates on GDPUK, the web group for UK dentists to discuss their profession online, www.gdpuk. com. Tony founded this group in 1997 which now has around 7,000 unique visitors per month, who make 35,000 visits and generate more than a mil- lion pages on the site per month. Tony is sure GDPUK.com is the liveliest and most topical UK dental website.