Dr. Joel Antel president@cda-adc.ca SeeingChange as anOpportunity Since my installation as CDA president in April, I’ve reflected on both the profession I’ve loved for more than 40 years and the organization that I have the honour of serving for the upcoming year. I care deeply about dentistry and my fellow dentists; you are my colleagues, my friends, and the people who understand me best. We share challenges, frustrations and successes. In my time in organized dentistry, I’m always thinking about the important work that we, the dentists of Canada, are doing every day. The last few years have brought big changes to dentistry, which have in turn helped CDA evolve. During my tenure on the CDA Board of Directors, I’ve also seen a new way of doing things. We’ve been considering our values and how to integrate these values into our work, including environmental responsibility and diversity, equity and inclusion. We’ve had discussions about how to encourage and support dentists who are early in their careers so that the profession, and its leaders, can become as diverse as the population we serve. Of course, the change and disruption experienced in the last few years have been challenging but have also resulted in new opportunities. In the coming year, I’d like to take time to align and coordinate our core values. We can apply such values to something as simple as a travel policy: How can we build strong relationships within the oral health community but keep our environmental footprint small? We can also use our values to build toward something as complex as a future for dentistry in Canada that supports the interrelation of the environment and human health. The response of organized dentistry to the Canadian Dental Care Plan (CDCP) has transformed the relationships between the provincial and territorial dental associations (PTDAs) and CDA. Instead of operating in relative isolation, we’ve come together in a truly coordinated effort. Now more than ever, we can envision our shared goals, figure out what needs to be done, and then support those among us suited to get the best results. I want this new paradigm to continue. Dr. Aaron Burry, CDA’s CEO, used a metaphor to describe the CDA-PTDA relationship that resonated with me. There are two parallel runways at an airport; they point in the same direction, are linked to the main terminal, but they don’t overlap. CDA, as a national organization, serves our shared goals best at a policy level and provides feedback to the federal government directly on the bigger picture issues. The PTDAs, who represent their members more directly, serve our shared goals best by working out the details of how the CDCP needs to function on the ground and the finer points of how it will be implemented. Sometimes people ask me why dental associations are still important. My answers have always included both tangible and intangible benefits. Our coordinated work to improve the CDCP has made a lot of those seemingly intangible benefits more concrete: being the national voice for dentistry and representing the expertise of the profession with the federal government have never been more important. The CDCP, as it was first conceived, had some flaws. We’ve been able to flag this right from the beginning to help the government solve some of the program’s issues. This was only possible because CDA and the PTDAs worked together and brought our unique strengths to the collective effort. Recently, I made a presentation at a provincial dental association meeting. I called in advance and asked, “What do dentists in your province want to know about? What are their concerns? What do they care about right now?” I want to connect CDA’s work to the specific needs and experiences of dentists across the country. Building robust relationships between organizations, ones that are more than the sum of our individual relationships, is our goal. From the President 7 Issue 3 | 2024 | CDA atWork
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