Manchester Dental Students get a ‘Trained Brain’

As a final year student at Manchester University and senior BDSA representative I have had the opportunity to cross-represent the BDA student committee several times. One of my recent experiences was a student committee meeting for the British Medical Association (BMA). Among various issues raised and discussed one in particular stood out, medicine seems to have a strong focus on improving student communication skills, and it got me thinking about dentistry. Does the dental undergraduate course focus on communication skills enough? After all, the future of dentistry is people, the more we understand about people, the more understand our business. We are all selected from an interview process in which these skills are taken into consideration, but some people are more gifted communicators than others, so shouldn’t we dental students be enhancing our patient skills to increase our chances of success as early as possible?

During my 5 years of dentistry I have worked for Red Bull part-time as a student brand manager. During this time I have received fairly extensive communication and marketing training, which I believe has helped me immensely when it comes to dealing with the public. Red Bull work closely with Jamie Edwards to deliver this communication and mental coaching. Jamie, from Trained Brain, has worked with a whole range of clientèle including multimillion pound businesses to Freddie Flintoff throughout the Ashes, 2005 not 2007!

With students being a major focus for Red Bull, what better way to support us than show an invested interest in our education? So with Red Bull, Jamie Edwards, the head of school and undergraduate teaching at Manchester University and the BDA on board, the date was set and venue booked. Laura Thompson on behalf of the BDA supported the lecture and opened up the morning’s proceedings, she highlighted yet another string to the BDA’s many stranded bow, demonstrating the wide variety of patient communication support the BDA offer to their members. Then Jamie took to the stage who in the limited time slot of 2 hours covered a range of topics from how to influence your patients, how to handle the occupational stress of our future dental careers to how to present yourself in interviews. We were introduced to some invaluable concepts of coping with and handling our professional life. The feedback from the session was incredibly positive with students commenting ‘that was the best lecture this year’ and ‘I wish I’d been taught that in the first year’.

This lecture was the first of its kind at Manchester and has been a great success thanks to Red Bull and the BDA. The dental undergraduate course is dedicated to equipping student dentists for a future in dentistry, a future which depends on good patient communication and understanding.




Written By Charlotte Tams, Manchester Dentist School