A sorry failure

Observant readers will have noted the absence, in the past two issues, of the feature ‘I Iearnt from dentistry from that’. This was started, in June 2019, as a result of a positive response from readers to an editorial in January 2019, by us,¹ in which we asked readers if they would be prepared to contribute to a feature in which dentists would recount positive and negative events from their professional lives. The notion was to mimic pilots' open reporting culture with a view to increasing safety. However, in the dental world, it appears that there is not a thirst for this concept, hence the absence of the feature. Dentists and pilots share a need to be good communicators, but it appears that dentists are shy regarding publicizing their failures and/or too modest to share their successes. The editor had planned to make this point by publishing a blank half page in this issue, but, to his surprise and joy, suitable material arrived on the Dental Update doorstep: hence no blank half page!