Are you happy for me to open that? I think the dental ones are no different to any other healthcare professionals at the moment. So, if you're a medic—and I sit around with medics all the time—they're having similar sorts of conversations. I don't think there's a simple answer to it but there are lots of key bits that I think we all seem to feel are important to that. There's certainly a generational issue. When I went through, the first thing I wanted to do was own my own practice. That's changing. The new guys coming through don't want that; they're looking at more life-work balances, which is great. You can't criticise that, but it does affect the dynamics, particularly in their late 20s and early 30s because they don't want mortgages, they want a bit of flexibility within that.
They're looking more broadly in the sense of their career over 30 to 40 years and what they want to do during that period, so that changes those early days. So, the younger dentist side of things—we are now dealing with a different group of individuals and I think, in Wales, because of the peculiarities just generally, as in medicine, and we have to look a bit more innovatively at how the demands of those individuals—. It's not like when I went through when it was very predictable, really. That's one issue with it.
I think the younger dentists coming through don't like the new contract. It's as simple as that. We see them in our health board from a training unit, where they have a very protected environment, and those within general practice, and you do see the sparkle go from their eye after a year or so because that contract is not a good environment. So, some of the changes we were talking about earlier on will start to affect that.
There is still a line between Wales and everywhere else. I speak to my colleagues in England and they say, 'I'm not going to Wales because—'; they see it as a barrier. So, it's how we break that down. One of the ways Wales has started to break that down and hopes to break that down is with something called national recruitment. So, a number of the key parts of the career pathway, where there's dental foundation training, dental core training, specialist training—a lot of those now are in national recruitment. And the idea with that is that we attract people in from England to come into the area, good people, and they will stay. We're finding that they're not necessarily staying; they're coming down, they're doing a year and then moving back to where their roots are. So, national recruitment is almost counter-productive at the moment—that's the feeling we are getting in our health board, that individuals who are coming in under national recruitment are not staying after a year or so.
Specialist training is another layer within that. Very similar—the issue with that is that specialists, when they go through the training, to keep them they need the next bit and we're not really good sometimes at thinking ahead four or five years to say, 'Actually, this is what we want from a service point of view.' I think a lot of the training programmes need to be service-driven going forward, not historical, what's happened in the past. What are our service needs? We mentioned minor oral surgery, special care dentistry. We really need to be bumping up the training for those individuals and modern training, because that's what the service will need going forward, and having those individuals working within a primary care, community care environment rather than a hospital.
So, there's a whole range of things in there. I'm hoping HEIW, the 'I', our innovation, will be a key bit, because I think that's where we have to do. We have to start thinking outside the box.