Clinical competence is a requirement of a successful practice. If people are going to seek you out rather than just going to someone who is contracted with their benefit provider, they need a reason. Clinical results are clearly one of those reasons.

Leadership Through Knowing Your Work

That being said, how well do you know your work? How well does your team know their work? Do the specialists and technicians that you work with make you better? Becoming highly competent in clinical dentistry begins with a decision. Have you made it?

If you have, are you maintaining that decision in the midst of all the resistance that you encounter as you try? Leadership, at its core, is about making a decision and maintaining that decision in the midst of pressure to do otherwise. Your clinical competence begins with a decision to be competent. How well it continues and develops depends on how important being highly competent is to you.

8 Complex Skills of Clinical Dentistry

Although clinical dentistry is not always complex, it requires a variety of complex skills. This includes:

1. Examination, Diagnosis, and Treatment Planning
2. Spatial Relationships & Esthetics
3. Biologic Principles
4. Local Anesthesia
5. Tooth Preparations
6. Provisionalization
7. Materials Application
8. Patient Management

You can add many more to my list. All of these skills are important in uniquely different ways. This is why continuing education and professional development in dentistry is so vital.

It is just plain difficult to develop so many skills and move them toward competence and mastery. Dentistry is both extremely rewarding and extremely demanding. So how are we going to develop competence that is moving toward mastery?

We need a plan that develops specific habits. We need the habits to serve our WHY. We need great teachers, leaders, and institutions that help us pursue the limits of our possibilities. It is a journey that never ends as long as we are given the gift of caring for another human being.