2021 - What a year! By Andrea Johnson

2021WHAT A YEAR!

By Andrea Johnson I Editorial Board Member

2021 started just like any other year... oh wait... no it didn’t because we were still in the midst of the covid crisis! 2020 had been the year of the worst of the crisis. I had been redeployed early on, onto the fit testing team, then back into dental later to get things moving again, in and out of meetings with the CDO and others trying to make sense of it all and, of course get the plight of the labs noticed – mixed bag of results on that one.

I, as many others also had a quiet Christmas with no family allowed to visit as well as so many more ups and downs over the year. Weird year for us all overall. So, I can be forgiven for thinking that 2021 would be the year when things get better right?

Well, it started off reasonably OK, I had been making a nuisance of myself on Twitter and elsewhere as I do, trying to get more inclusive opportunities for the entire dental team, especially techs. How many leadership/ fellowship schemes are out there which are targeted at clinicians only? How is that fair? And who said that just because you are a dentist or doctor you are automatically suited to being in charge or being a leader as opposed to another member of the team?

These were and still are my points, I have been ignored, I have had snotty responses and I have had those that pay lip service but don’t actually do anything to make the change and invite us in and I have finally found some that are willing to put their money where their mouth is. The first of these is the Healthcare Leadership Academy (HLA). Those that know me will have seen my posts about these already, but I had looked on their website after seeing them advertise a leadership scholarship which was using all the wrong (in my humble opinion) language as it was only geared up to attract clinicians. I of course found someone high up to pester about this and challenged them to defend their position as I saw it based on the language they were using, as to why they were just advertising for clinicians, why could this not be available to non-clinical team members too? To their credit they immediately apologised for what they saw as a grievous error, went onto their site and changed a load of their terminology and assured me that they were open to all prospective leaders with the right qualities, that it absolutely was not just for clinical staff at all. I of course called their bluff applied and yes, I got accepted! I will tell you more about this in another article soon because you all really need to know about it. However, back to my year.

March 2021, my world was about to get turned upside down for a good few months, I was diagnosed with Breast Cancer. Totally unexpected, found a lump whilst showering, it was quite large and I knew it wasn’t supposed to be there so I called the docs and got the diagnosis process going. Everything seem to take so long, especially in those early stages, waiting for appointments – which are delayed due to Covid, having biopsies, various scans, blood tests etc. Waiting for the results and wondering and worrying about how bad it is, what the treatment options are and so on.

However, during this time I decided, for me, it would be business as usual, I see no point at all dwelling on things you cannot control. In the grand scale of things, it didn’t take as long as it could have done and I got the treatment I needed. I won’t go into gory detail (check out my Youtube channel if you want to know more) but I had 6 rounds of chemo, lost all my hair, had an operation to remove the lump and my lymph nodes and then had 9 rounds of radiotherapy. I am now back at work, hair growing back and it seems like we got rid of it. So, great news.

I did of course have to postpone some activities such as my open water diving course, my skydive, 2 x tough mudders and a trek up mount Toubkal in Morocco. But I continued to go to the gym every day, to work on my Masters as best I could – neither easy whilst having chemo. I applied to be a HLA scholar, continued my work with on the various strategy groups, advisory groups, general consulting etc with the GDC, CGDent & HEEM. I wrote articles for various dental press agencies as well as The Dental Technician of course and I carried on running Den-Tech.

I am still working on all the items above as well as various other projects, I am now a proud HLA Leadership scholar and am chairing their first ever Women in Healthcare Leadership Summit in 2022, working on a project to help improve aspects of their HLA Ideas charity programme and, as the only dental technician on the programme, tasked with helping them open this up and encourage even more of us and the rest of the dental team to get involved.

This year has not been great, but you know what? It could have been so much worse, I am grateful for the opportunities I have been given, I am grateful for the immense support I have received from my family, friends and of course the amazing dental tech community. I know there have been so many others that have had it far worse than me and I know that 2023 will be the year when things get better! So on that note, I wish you all a very merry Christmas and an incredibly happy new year!