You mentioned there about um media coverage as well.
You're affectionately known as the man on the BBC couch for,
for, for many people in the profession.
I've certainly got a face for radio, haven't I really?
Yeah. But there's, there's within that dentistry
generally, certainly at the last election we were told that dentistry was a topic that
voters were concerned about.
Surely that should be an incentive then for people to be um engaging with the BDA if it is
going to have influence and be having those kind of conversations with uh um with the
incoming government or with frontline politics in a way that perhaps they wouldn't have been
able to 10 years ago.
Yeah, I, I, I, I think I was naive enough, perhaps back in the day,
uh, to think that if the BDA was, was an effective campaigner for the profession,
that the floodgates would open and we, we'd get a load of members.
The sad reality is, you know, we spend a huge amount of members' resources putting together
evidence for the doctors and dentists review body.
But everyone benefits and um you know, a lot of people ride the bus without buying a ticket and
um and as a consequence, you know, I get more people saying,
well done, and then you turn round to them and say, well,
are you a member?
And they say no.
And I do worry because I think, you know, in 10 or 15 years if we don't do anything
to uh reverse the decline in membership.
The people won't really understand what the BDA have done so we're not there to do it.
And uh, you know, in many ways we influence, you know,
I've been on the meeting today with the Director General of the Armed Forces,
and, you know, across the whole of the profession, where any anywhere where dentists
are working. Things are bloody tough everywhere at the
moment, whether you're working in any of the countries in the UK or whether you're working
in salaried service, hospital dentistry, um, you know,
if you're working as an academic in a dental school, or you,
you know, you're in the armed forces or the other committees,
consultants in Dental Public Health Committee, all these committees we have.
Across the board, everyone is facing huge pressures um.
And you know, uh, it's my privilege to go along to these committees and hear,
you know, how we can help and support colleagues in,
in all fields really of dentistry.
You, you, you mentioned there the free rider problem that people will get the benefits of
your campaign in regardless of whether they are um members or not.
So we should make it explicitly clear then, what, what do people get for their membership
of the BDA? Yeah, I mean, uh, I, I think there's,
you know, one of the, one of the things we did in the last,
um, in the last triennium, and we work in trienniums, we work in 3 rotations.
So for example, we've just elected new committees, um,
from December of this year, um.
And they will represent the profession in, in all those fields that I sort of intimated
earlier on, and, and, you know, what, what we did last year and the year before that was
really try and work on developing the website.
So that um people who were on the essential level of membership started to see more of what
they could get for their money, and so much more of the things were loading up onto our
website, both educational and advisory is, is, is there for people.
Um, but, you know, you get. Access to all our,
all our training uh facilities and all our educational material we have online,
you get the representative angle, obviously, but you have access to advice in in certain
levels of membership, and of course we've developed over the last,
6 or 7 years now, an indemnity product that we have linked to membership in that we
believed that um if we got people as extra and um and um expert
membership, they would get the support as well as the indemnity product,
um, to help them.
So if they got into trouble with, you know, uh a GDC issue or a complaint in any way,
we would have the backup.
Amongst the, the, the BDA staff to actually help them in the future,
not get into those positions.