AMY BIRD

ARE WE ALL THINKING THE SAME?

Amy Bird argues that true diversity isn’t just about who gets a seat at the table – it’s about having the confidence to think differently once you’re there.

When I was given diversity as the theme for this month’s column, I initially thought about all the things we would normally associate with that word. Of course representation matters hugely, particularly in aesthetics, where for many years our education, imagery and even our understanding of anatomy and ageing hasn’t always represented the diversity of the patients sitting in front of us.

But the more I thought about it, the more I kept coming back to a slightly different kind of diversity. Diversity in how we think, how we practise and even how we get to where we are professionally. Because, dare I say it, I think aesthetics has become a bit copy -and-paste.

ARE WE MOVING BACKWARDS?

It’s something I’ve noticed more and more over the past few years. We have more practitioners, more conferences, more education and more access to information than we have ever had, which should surely mean more ideas and more debate. Yet sometimes it feels like we’re all moving in the opposite direction.

The same terminology starts cropping up everywhere. The same treatment approaches. The same techniques. The same article content. Even the way we talk about our work starts to sound remarkably similar.

I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with being influenced by other people. I certainly have been.

That’s one of the lovely things about education. Someone makes you see something differently, and you combine it with everything else you know and, hopefully, it changes your practice.

But I do think there’s a difference between learning from somebody and trying to become them.

MORE THAN JUST A SEAT AT THE TABLE

Perhaps my feelings about this have also been shaped by being a nurse in this sector and industry. I am incredibly proud of my nursing background, but I’d be lying if I said there haven’t been occasions during my career when I’ve felt I had to prove myself a little more because of it. There is still, at times, an assumption that one professional title automatically carries greater academic or clinical weight than another.

What’s interesting is that, as my career has progressed, I’ve actually become less interested in trying to prove that nurses deserve to sit at certain tables and much more interested in what nurses bring to those tables in the first place. I don’t want to think like a doctor. I’m not one.

My nursing background is probably one of the biggest influences on the way I practise. It’s why I’m so obsessed with assessment. It’s why I struggled with transactional aesthetics and the idea that somebody can walk into a clinic, point at a line and we simply treat the line.

It’s why I want to understand the patient – that comes from nursing; we are, by virtue, the expert in patient care.

Equally, there are things my medical and dental colleagues see differently because of their training, and I learn from that. I work closely with aestheticians and value what they bring to my own multidisciplinary approach, particularly when it comes to skin. None of us needs to pretend to be the other for that to work. In fact, surely the whole point of a multidisciplinary team is that we aren’t all bringing exactly the same thing?

UNDERSTANDING OVER STANDARDISATION

I sometimes wonder whether, in our determination to establish aesthetics as a credible specialty, we’ve accidentally decided there is one correct way to look and sound credible.

I see it in education too; there absolutely has to be standardisation around safety, anatomy, evidence and competency. I spend a huge amount of my professional life arguing for exactly that, but standardising standards is very different from standardising thought.

I don’t want someone to come on one of my training days and leave knowing how to copy my injection points. I want them to understand why I chose them. If I assess a patient and make a particular treatment decision, the interesting bit isn’t necessarily where I put the needle. It’s everything that happened before I picked it up.

Another experienced practitioner might assess that same patient and do something slightly differently. Provided they can explain their reasoning, support it with anatomy and evidence and deliver it safely, I don’t find that threatening. I find it interesting; that’s how I learn. Surely we should all learn more about our own identity in the same way?

DON’T LET THE ALGORITHM THINK FOR YOU

I think social media has probably made this harder. We’re all exposed to everybody else’s work constantly. We know which posts perform well, which phrases get engagement and which treatments are having their moment.

It’s very easy to start absorbing all of it. I tend to bury my head and just say ‘white noise Amy, its just a shop front’ because before long we have the same reels, the same phrases, the same “signature” treatments and, occasionally, what looks suspiciously like the same presentation with a different font.

Maybe that’s the diversity conversation I’d like us to have a little more often. Not just who gets a seat at the table, although that absolutely matters, but whether we actually value different thinking once they get there.

Do we want the nurse in the room if she brings a nursing perspective that challenges everyone else?

Do we want younger practitioners to question the people who trained them?

Are we comfortable with somebody saying they don’t agree with the accepted approach? And are we genuinely interested in new ideas, or only once they’ve become popular enough for everybody else to adopt them too?

I hope the people I teach don’t end up practising exactly like me. That’s the truth. In 10 years, I hope some of them are doing things I haven’t thought of yet. I hope they question things I currently teach because new evidence has shown us something different and I hope I’m secure enough in my own experience to listen when they do.

We spend an awful lot of time in aesthetics talking about preserving individuality in our patients; maybe we need to get a little better at preserving it in ourselves too.

Just a thought, gentle readers, hoping this resonates with some of you.

Bird’s THE WORD

Every issue, Amy Bird, our aesthetic nurse on the inside, reflects on life within the sector

AMY BIRD

Amy Bird RGN NMP is an award-winning nurse prescriber, speaker, trainer and KOLwith more than a decade of full time experience in medical aesthetics. She is lead nurse at her practice, KAST Medical Aesthetics in Cheshire, and recently became chair of BAMAN. She is a passionate advocate for best practice, standards and patient safety.