Al-Falaki: pushing through stress does not help, the BDA points to up to three quarters of the profession

Endurance as a professional virtue and as a problem

Rana Al-Falaki, a specialist in periodontology who also works as a coach in leadership and work performance, writing for the British portal Dentistry.co.uk, questions a norm the profession rarely challenges: that stress is dealt with by simply pushing through it.

Her thesis is that this is not a neutral strategy. Suppressing stress in dentistry is not merely accepted but valued, which is exactly why it goes unnoticed. Al-Falaki argues that this pattern makes the outcome worse rather than easier, and proposes replacing suppression with stress management: recognising the load in time and working with it, instead of pushing it below the threshold of awareness until it erupts as burnout. The shift from suppression to management, she argues, improves personal performance and the running of the practice, not just how one feels.

As context she notes that dentistry consistently ranks among the most stressful occupations in the United Kingdom, and that British Dental Association (BDA) data suggest stress-related difficulties affect up to three quarters of dental professionals. She describes burnout as the profession's silent epidemic.

Context

The three-quarters figure refers to the British population of dental professionals and comes from BDA data; no comparable Croatian figure is given in the source, so the percentage must not be carried over to the profession here as if it applied equally.

For the practice

• The mechanism transfers, the percentage does not: a schedule without a single break and the habit of just getting the day finished are not a sign of endurance but a risky pattern.
• Discuss workload in the team as an operational topic, appointment length, the number of complex procedures in a row, the arrangement of breaks, rather than as a question of character.
• If you recognise the pattern in yourself, seek professional help exactly as you would for any other work-related trouble; delay is precisely what the author describes as the core of the problem.