The 2011 Conference was held at the impressively appointed St Mellion Golf and Country Club in Cornwall and was excellently organised by Gerry Butler. Inspite of the long distance many of the delegates had to travel we had an excellent turn out and a superb Conference and dinner.
Our usual key note speaker Barry Cockcroft was unavailable through illness and the DOH was represented by Elizabeth Lynam who set the scene nationally for us. This was the followed by an inspirational speech from Helen Hirst who urged all us experienced clinicians to be ready to lead from the front when required as a our knowledge and perspective would be needed.
John Milne gave us the BDA view which was extremely supportive of DPAs and Liz Kaye gave us an informative presentation as to how she set up the new Peninsula school and selected her students.
The AGM wisely returned the same enlarged committee as we foresaw an increase in work load in the coming year. An excellent dinner followed during which we were entertained by Kayleigh who is a multi talented student at the Peninsula dental school.
The Friday session was started by Martin Fulford who discussed HTM0105. The work of the SW deanery and the difficulties with funding and foundation training was explained to us by Alisdair Miller the rest of the morning was broadly based on how to handle difficult practices and Capsticks gave a dual presentation on how best to deal with local performance problems.
Drew Wallbank a local complaints officer used his tuba to pull us through the penultimate part of a long conference and finally Peter Hodgkinson gave an excellent overview of the current work stream of the CQC.
Next years conference will be held in Leicester and will be organised by Jit Hondocha and more details will be released nearer the time.
Profuse thanks are due again to Chris Hoyle for his photographs and of course all the committee who do a huge amount of unsung, unnoticed work throughout the year.
Your committee executive for next year re-appointed at the AGM is
Chairman Geoff Brown
Vice Chairman John Ginty
Secretary Nick Lamb
Treasurer Frank van Russelt
Conference organiser Jit Hindocha
Other committee members are ;
Mike Williams
Martin Cassidy
Tom Norfolk
Sean Bradley
Malcolm Smith
Since going to press with this report Frank Van Russelt has sadly resigned as treasurer after being on the first ever NADA committee and his wise words,wit and musical talents will be missed by us all.
Tom Norfolk has kindly “volunteered” to be the new treasurer and we are very grateful to him for stepping into the breach at such short notice.
