HEALTH HUB – Dental Health Service

Click the button to visit Denflix where we’re building a practical learning platform to help you start a dental business — or even a wider health franchise — focused on prevention and real access to care.

The current dental system is struggling. Too often it feels driven by corporate habits and box-ticking rules, and it’s drifted away from its real purpose: delivering health.

This video is one of my best because it explains a different pathway — one that could work far better with smarter, lighter regulation that supports access instead of restricting it.

Since retiring, I’ve taken a number of courses, including one on health innovation funded by the NHS. One thing became very clear: dentistry attracts very little funding — and there’s even less appetite to fund alternative models of dental care. So if we want change, we have to build it ourselves.

I’ve tried applying for funding for general dentistry projects. The process can take days, and you’re often competing against well-resourced teams from large organisations who do this full-time. On the innovation course, most of the government funding focus was on conditions like cancer and obesity, not oral health. But do they not also want an integrated healthcare system?

So I developed a cancer proposal initially, then an App, then a SaaS, then a green sustainable one all on dentistry to improve access and outcomes.

mouth cancer screening,
a dental prevention app,
3D denture printing,
and teledentistry.

Another proposal is for Health Hubs (the video above)— local, practical centres that make prevention and early support easier to access. The idea was sparked on my flight home while reading the IT business “white book” below that launched a new form of retail outlet,and thinking about how simple, scalable service models are built.

For more ideas, visit the Teeth4life YouTube channel and search “DHS”. I’ve also prepared pitch decks for these projects — if you’re interested in helping fund or develop them, please get in touch.

Modern technology gives us real opportunities to improve health and wellbeing — but only if we use it wisely.
When I started in dentistry, clinical notes were kept short, and X-rays lived in paper folders that literally faded with time. Computers have brought huge benefits, but they’ve also created a new problem: documentation can drift away from what matters most — the patient — and towards what protects us from legal action.
In an ideal world, we should record what is genuinely in the patient’s interests: clear findings, sensible decisions, and agreed plans — not pages of defensive paperwork. Warnings about “creeping bureaucracy” aren’t new either; they were being raised as far back as the 1950s “Parkinson’s Law’, and more recently in the “Unacountability machine” by Dan Davies.

Interestingly, one of the most influential figures in improving oral health published a book in 1923 and he worked in advertising, not health. On the surface it’s about marketing, but the real lesson is about human behaviour — and behaviour is what drives health outcomes.
I’ve short videos on his habit loop. Claude Hopkins died in 1932, but to learn more about how we can improve all our health follow Rory Sutherland. If you watch him on YouTube he reminds me of an old Doctor.

Ultimately, if there’s enough interest, I’d like to offer a simple way for practices and individual dental professionals to have their own basic website or profile page built through this project.

If that appeals to you, please get in touch.

To begin with it will be straightforward — the idea has been on my Miro board for a while, and I’m now turning it into something usable. The key benefit is visibility: you would be listed on DentalHealthService.org, with a page that shows far more detail about the services you offer. Over time, there will also be the option to customise and expand your page further.

During Covid I built the Denflix website and created a set of videos on standard treatments aimed at newly qualified dentists. In hindsight, it may have been a step too far — but the content is there, and it can be improved. It will be a library for you to select the services you promote.

I’ve also created templates with instructions that allow you to add your own voiceover (or even your own video) to educational materials. With your help, we can refine these resources and make them genuinely useful for the wider dental team. Few will listen to me, but your patients will listen to your advice. They trust you.

During and after Covid, it became clear that many dental students and newly qualified clinicians weren’t getting the same clinical exposure that previous generations had.

If universities like Stanford are happy to publish lectures on starting a business online, you’d think dental schools might also be willing to share basic teaching on standard treatments to support early-career clinicians.

I searched what was already available on YouTube and began building my own library of resources, based around “bronze standard” and “gold standard” approaches to common treatments. Too often, we get into difficulty by trying to deliver a gold-standard service while working inside a stretched, failing system.

Those video libraries are currently unlisted (hidden), but they exist as a starting point.

Please visit the homepage to see how, by collaborating and sharing practical resources, we can support each other and improve wellbeing — for clinicians and the public alike. The video below demonstates how you can make your own videos on your phone in uner five minute, with a bit of practice. 😁