Should You Enter Awards?

Should You Enter Awards? Nearly Two Decades of Judging Tells Me Yes, But Not Only for the Reasons You Think

I have been a judge for the UK National Private Dentistry Awards for close to two decades. In that time, I have seen varying trends in the quality and quantity of submissions from practices across the UK, and I have watched the standard of entry rise considerably, not just in what practices are achieving but in how clearly they have learned to articulate it.

The question I get asked most often by practice owners considering entering is some version of: " Is it worth the effort?” The answer is yes, but the reasons that matter most are not always the ones people expect.

The Marketing Case Is Real, and Usually Understated

Let us deal with the marketing argument first, because it tends to be the only one that gets made, and it is typically made too modestly.

Being shortlisted for a major dental award is not a minor credential. It means your practice has been assessed against a competitive field by people with significant experience in the profession and found to meet a genuinely high standard. The shortlisting itself is worth communicating, not just the win. Many practices hold back on any announcement until they know whether they have taken the trophy home, and in doing so they miss weeks of legitimate marketing opportunity. A shortlisting tells its own story: this practice entered, was independently assessed, and made the final round. Patients understand what that means, even if they cannot fully appreciate the criteria.

The entry process also generates content that practices would not otherwise produce. Documenting what you have actually built, the story of a patient journey you designed, the team initiative that changed how the practice operates, creates material with genuine substance. It is specific, it is real, and it communicates quality in a way that generic marketing rarely manages. Practices that already understand the value of a clear dental marketing strategy often find awards amplify everything else they are already doing well.

What the Entry Process Does to a Team

This is the benefit that surprised me most when I first became a judge, and it is the one I now consider the most significant.

A good award submission requires a practice to answer questions it may not have been asking itself with any regularity. What have we actually achieved this year? What are we most proud of, and why? What changed for our patients as a result of something we deliberately did differently? The teams that work through these questions together, that sit down and collectively narrate what they have built, consistently describe the process as one of the most clarifying conversations they have had as a group.

Team members who have been too close to the daily work to see it from the outside gain a perspective on their own contribution that changes how they relate to the practice. The dental nurse who has been doing something quietly excellent for three years sees it named and valued. The receptionist who facilitated the new patient call process understands for the first time that it was worth the effort. This shift is not easily measurable, but it is real, and it tends to outlast the awards process by years.

Practices with strong cultures often invest intentionally in team motivation and leadership development long before recognition arrives externally.

What I See from the Judging Panel That Most Practice Owners Don't

From a judging position, you see the profession from an angle that nobody inside a single practice ever quite can. You read entries from practices that are pioneering things quietly and without fanfare: sustainability initiatives that have genuinely changed how a practice operates, community involvement programmes that have built remarkable local trust, patient experience redesigns that are setting a standard others will eventually follow. None of this makes it into clinical journals. Much of it only becomes visible when a practice decides to write it down and enter.

However, what distinguishes the strongest entries is never the size of the practice or the impressiveness of the headline statistics alone. It is the coherence of the story. A practice that can articulate clearly what it set out to do, what it actually did, what changed as a result, and what it learned along the way, is demonstrating something that goes well beyond the category it entered. That coherence is itself the mark of a well-led practice with a principal who understands what they are building and why.

The weaker entries, and there are many, tend to list achievements without context. They tell you what happened but not why it mattered, to whom, or what the practice intends to do next. Also, they fail to provide evidence and proof of their claims. The gap between a strong submission and a weak one is largely the gap between a practice with a clear sense of its own direction and one that is simply reporting activity without a narrative thread to hold it together. This is often where practice vision becomes critical, because practices with long-term clarity communicate their progress far more effectively.

The Effort Is Real, and So Is the Return

A serious award submission takes time. A well-considered entry for a competitive category takes weeks of drafting, evidence gathering, and refinement. This is not trivial for a practice whose team is already stretched. It is worth being direct about that cost rather than suggesting the process is painless.

What makes it worth doing is partly the external recognition, partly the marketing value, and substantially the internal value of the process itself. If your practice has done genuinely good work, work you are proud of that has made a real difference to patients and team alike, the discipline of articulating that work clearly is valuable regardless of the outcome. You come out of the process knowing your own practice better than you did when you went in.

And if you are shortlisted or win, you receive something very few practices obtain: an expert external perspective on what you have built and where it stands relative to the profession. I have watched that feedback change how principals think about their own practices in ways that persist long after the award ceremony itself.

The trophy, when it comes, is gratifying. But it is rarely the most valuable thing a practice takes home from the experience. Many practices later use those insights as part of wider high performance coaching and long-term growth planning.