Dental practitioners face a unique set of challenges that can take a toll on their mental and emotional well-being. From dealing with anxious patients to managing the demands of a fast-paced work environment, the stress can be overwhelming. However, developing resilience – the ability to bounce back from adversity and adapt to change – can help navigate these challenges with greater ease and maintain a healthy work-life balance.

As a profession that advocates for prevention over cure, it can be surprising and saddening to know that the same approach isn’t applied to clinician wellbeing. With mental health concerns rising amongst dental professionals, it’s imperative that we focus on clinician wellbeing now more than ever. Adding tools to their wellbeing toolkit is a great start, and one of those tools is resilience.

If we consider resilience to be the capacity or ability to recover from difficulties, proactive resilience – or ‘prosilience’ – is the steps we can take to develop, deepen or embed our emotional and mental capacity to recover, before this resilience is needed.