Dear Fingal
I’m Stephen Murray. For a couple of decades now, I’ve been helping local families and individuals. I thought I’d explain a bit about why I do it, and how.
I don’t know what things you’ll see or read today, so if you’re reading this, then straight off, I will thank you for lending me your attention for a minute or two and I promise I’ll do my best not to waste it.
You’re probably going to be bombarded all day or all week by stuff from or about famous people. I have been on RTE and BBC because of what I do, but I’m not that sort of famous. Many of my own patients –hopefully just the younger ones - might not know my name, I’m simply “that guy in Swords Ortho” that their parents bring them to.
Yes, there were those interviews and as well there were prizes and a presidency, articles and an ambassador position, memberships and committees, lectures, webinars and workshops, and presentations and representations, and they’re all a load of fun to do and an honour to be asked to do, but fundamentally what I enjoy is treating patients. These non-clinical things all arise from my quarter century, or thereabouts, as an orthodontist in Ireland. And more specifically most are from the half of that time when I’ve been lucky enough to lead an effective – and growing - team as the current principal of Swords Orthodontics. Over that time, our commitment to our patients wasn’t just maintained, it increased.
But the Swords Ortho story is about more than teeth.
It’s about more than treatment and transaction.
It’s about tradition, transformation, and trust.
I came to work in Swords in 2006, about half way through my career so far as a dentist and now I live about a mile and a half north of the practice. Although I’m not from the area, Ireland is a small place and the connections were pretty obvious to me when I arrived. My grandfather worked in a bank in Skerries, and my dad was living in Skerries when he graduated in dentistry from UCD (yes, it was so long ago that dentists graduated from a different university – nowadays the dentistry course is run through Trinity College). I have patients who are the children and grandchildren of people he went to school with, or live in their streets now.
He moved north, but the rest of his family (and my mum’s) stayed south so we’d drive through Swords on the way to visit my relatives when I was a child.
Then the bypass was built, then the motorway, and Swords got big when I wasn’t looking. Now it’s the biggest town in Dublin, the third biggest town in Ireland, so coming here to run Swords Orthodontics was taking on a big responsibility.
My journey to this point wasn’t in a straight line, it wasn’t even on a flat surface. It began playing with Lego in the rooms above a dental practice (we lived “above the shop”) in Northern Ireland during The Troubles and moved on to a university in Belfast and then to hospitals in Dundonald and Derry. Most of what I was doing then was the surgical side of dentistry: wisdom teeth, abscesses and tumours by day and broken jaws, bullets and baseball bats by night. It brought me into contact with inspiring teams of people that put the patients first and knew they were working for something greater than what was immediately around them. No wonder, because some days the stakes could be very, very high.
But surgery wasn’t my vocation.
The values of paying attention to the details, developing yourself so that you can be more useful to the people you serve, and the importance of what you do when no one is looking came with me when I moved to England and became an orthodontist and then came back to Ireland – this time working for the HSE in Galway, staying in one job long enough to see treatments through to finish and beyond and the effect they could have on our patients.
Making things, either creating something from scratch or taking the things that you have and putting them in their best, most useful, positions is what I like to do. I probably build more flat pack furniture than Lego now, but it was that progression that demonstrates what led me to orthodontics and what led me to operate my own practice.
Being at Swords Ortho is the longest I have been in any job, to the extent that it’s not just a job any more, and it hasn’t been for a long time. It’s part of who I am now.
I have treated the children of former patients and the parents of former patients, and often the brothers and sisters and cousins and friends of former patients and each time it’s humbling and touching and, to be fair, a privilege that these people put their trust in me because of something they saw that I had done for someone else.
Unlike a lot of dentistry, what we do is obvious to the patient and even more so to people they meet.
And when a dentist refers a patient to me or my associates here, then it’s because they see something in our work that a patient may well be oblivious about though someone with professional knowledge knows is what they want for their patients.
When a dentist brings their own child to us to be treated that trust is at its peak.
Within Swords Orthodontics, I wasn’t just assembling furniture, it was my responsibility to assemble a team of people that would work together to deserve that trust. Select them, train them, empower them, support them through their own professional development. Together we made the systems that look after our patients day in, day out. As the practice got bigger, it wasn’t just me doing the orthodontics, and I was joined by a group of conscientious and capable specialist orthodontists as my associates.
Before coming to Swords Ortho, many of the team were in completely different industries, with no experience in dentistry. We’ve formally trained dental nurses, orthodontic therapists, X-ray takers, and it’s still ongoing. You can be sure we’ll be looking for the next course to get someone into to help deliver better for our patients.
I know that on the days that I’m not in the practice, the team runs it to the same standards, with the same care and commitment to each patient and each other.
Drawn from Naul and Lusk, Rush and Balbriggan, to Portmarnock and Malahide and Swords itself, and plenty of places in between and beyond, my crew have had the local knowledge that I would never have. Beyond the dentistry and orthodontics…over the years I think we’ve celebrated 7 weddings and 18 children born to the team members at Swords Ortho. We’ve supported local teams in GAA, rugby, hockey, basketball and even slam poetry.
Apart from the big desk you meet when you enter Swords Ortho, the physical practice is completely overhauled from where it began. Now we routinely use machines that didn’t really exist back then like 3D scanners and printers, we rarely do mouldings of people’s teeth and treatment planning is usually done on virtual models of teeth; but also from the dental chairs to the cabinets, the computers to the carpets, and the X-ray equipment to the sterilising and decontamination, everything has been replaced, updated, or upgraded over the years.
I developed too as a dentist and as a man.
Teeth are what I do, but people are who I do it for and despite all the courses and lectures I go to every year, it’s working out the best approach for a given patient that changed the most for me. When I started in dentistry, we never saw patients with neurodivergence and sensory disorders but now they regularly attend for treatment and it needs to be right for them. I never saw adult patients when I worked for the HSE, and almost none in the NHS, but now adults make up about a third of my patients. To be there when someone completes their treatment and be part of that joy when they find that, after decades, they are happy to smile for a photo or even a mirror is a joy in itself.
For the younger patients, I know that many of them will see the next century. I can’t imagine what developments in technology and human activity they will live through, and even though some of it won’t be good, I envy them because I would love to see it myself. I would love to know what orthodontics will be like for their grandchildren. I wonder what their journey through life will bring them but I hope it’ll be with a smile that will be to their advantage and the Swords Ortho Team played their part in that. It’s great to hear from someone we treated years ago who mentions they got a compliment about their smile.
Every time we treat someone, it is an example of what we can do. It has the capability of encouraging another person to come to us to see what we can do for them, but more than that it empowers someone to engage with the world more self-confidently for the rest of their lives.
It took a couple of decades for me to see it, but Swords Ortho is a story of trust and transformation, not transaction.
And together, we can make sure that never changes.
Sincerely yours,
Stephen Murray