BSDH Members Newsletter, October 2022

Dear members

I am pleased to say that all the legal hurdles regarding our change of name have now been sorted, and that the change from BSDH to BSSCD is now complete. We will be launching the new name at our forthcoming conference on Friday 2nd December.

The old bsdh.org website still works, and will continue to do so for the time being. However we are grateful to Fiona for managing to secure our new website domain- www.bsscd.org. This is now live and I recommend that you change your address books and use this new domain in future.

The executive committee met on 6th October and covered the following business-

  • The webinar launching the new GA guidance attracted over 120 delegates, and the feedback was excellent.

  • The winter conference on 2 December is now open for booking on the website. 

  • Charlotte Curl, our president elect is planning the spring conference for Thursday/Friday 4th and 5th May 2023 at Nottingham university. Please put the date in your diary.

  • Charlotte has also managed to secure an RCS England study day for special care dentistry on Friday 31st March next year. The theme is ‘mental health and its impact on dentistry’ This promises to be an excellent day - please put the date in your diaries.

  • Work is progressing on production of the new mental health guidelines. We are however having second thoughts about whether this is the right format for guidance on clinical holding and will provide an update on that piece of work after our next committee meeting.

  • Linked to the name change we agreed to commission Fiona to undertake a revamp of our website to ensure that it is technologically up to date.

  • Nick Beacher, who joined the committee last year to support Andy, has begun the process of re-establishing the teachers group. We discussed a draft constitution for the group, which we hope to finalise in February. The group will generally meet on line, and as before we would like representatives from all the dental schools. Please start thinking who may be best to approach in your area.

  • It has been suggested by a number of contacts that we ought have a consultant’s group, as indeed do most dental specialist societies. Again we are in the early stages of establishing a constitution for such a group and will hope to launch it within the next year.

  • Many years ago we had members of voluntary organisations on our committee; indeed one year Nick Goss was president. However, that has not been the case for a long time now. Our link with a national officer from MENCAP is well established, but that is the only voluntary group we currently work with. We have felt for some time that this is a weakness and we ought to work more with the voluntary sector. We want to take this forward by establishing an online group for service users that would advise the executive. If you have a contact from the voluntary sector, or indeed a patient who you think may be interested in joining such a group please can you let either This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. know.

  • As usual our AGM takes place during the December meeting and we have two vacancies on the committee. Nomination forms will be available on the website well before the meeting so please consider whether you are able to join us to help take the society forward. 

  • As Rebecca has now stepped up to the honorary secretary role, we are looking for one of the existing committee to take up the honorary assistant secretary post. Please could existing committee members consider this and contact This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. to express an interest.

  • We have also agreed that we need to improve our social media presence, and intend to create a post of media/ social media representative to sit on the committee. It is planned to appoint to this post as we currently do for example for our research/academia representative.

Finally an StR welcome event was held online on Wednesday 12th October organised by our current StR rep, Jalpa Patel. 30 StRs took part and I hope that this year’s batch of new StRs in the specialty now feel part of a much larger support network, and have built their contact list to help them through their studies.

I look forward to meeting many of you at our conference at the Royal College of Physicians in London on 2nd December - as I say bookings are now open so please go on the website and book to join us.

Peter Bateman

Chair BSDH