Originally Published in 2024
Jacques Glover has just handed back the on-call phone after another taxing day spent fixing faces at Waikato Hospital. “That’s always a nice moment,” he says. “With the on-call shifts, you might be called into the emergency department to drain pus at an ungodly hour and you’re back into work a few hours later. But at the end of it all, you’re still like, ‘That was a bit of fun.’” That’s certainly not most people’s idea of a good time, but Jacques ended up here because he decided to take a slightly different path to his peers.
While many dentistry graduates go straight into private practice, Jacques decided to spend a year working at a hospital after completing his training at the University of Otago. “I wanted to get some surgical skills, gain some experience and have a couple of good stories to tell around the dinner table,” he says, adding that it’s important to pick the right dinner table to tell those stories. That was in 2021 and he’s still working in the oral and maxillofacial department, which treats patients from all around the central North Island and deals with everything from trauma to cancer.
He says it was a big leap going from training that was often about “making teeth look nice” to “dealing with a patient whose jaw might be broken in four places or someone whose face is hanging off or split open”. “The first couple of weeks, you’re readjusting yourself to how a hospital runs and the sights you see. But once you’ve seen things like that a few times, you start to get used to it and you break it down and become a bit more analytical about what’s happened and what you need to do to fix it.”
Despite the intensity of the profession, many who choose to work in the health sector do so because they believe they’re making a difference. “The work is really tough. Some days are fine, but there are some days when it feels like you need to be in three places at once and you wonder, ‘How is this going to work?’ But you have a good feeling at the end of the day that you’ve helped someone.”
Unlike with dentistry, which often involves two people working in a room all day, Jacques is part of a big team –something he loves. “I get to interact with hundreds of different specialties. And when it works well, it works incredibly. There are specialists in every field putting in their two cents and then you get someone who comes through with an amazing outcome.”
While his time at the hospital won’t result in a formal qualification, the experience is akin to an apprenticeship and the on-the-job training is often recognised by employers. If he wants to focus more on surgery or another specialty area, he would have to go back through the medical system. That could be as much as 10 more years of study, which is not out of the question. “When you’re curious,learning becomes a bit more fun and interesting. You don’t do it because you have to, you do it because you want to figure out how it works and you carry on down that rabbit hole,” he says.
Away from the pressures of work and study, Jacques is an “active relaxer”. Being able to access the bush, beach or mountains –something that’s relatively easy from the “doughnut hole” that is Hamilton –is important to him and what initially drew him to the Pinnacle Programme. In 2015, he saw an ad offering successful applicants a trip on the Spirit of Adventure, so he applied as a year 13 student in Tauranga.
Outward Bound was another highlight of the programme where he learned the importance of working as a team, something that’s particularly relevant in his current role. “You realise you’re doing it all as a group and people are operating at different speeds or levels of experience, so it was often about adapting your approach to get over the finish line,” he says. “That has run through my mind a lot since then.” For Jacques, it was his peers in the programme –many of whom would catch up regularly in Dunedin –who had the biggest impact on him. “You create a great network and being part of that group of people who are going to change the world is a massive privilege.”
While Jacques isn’t looking too far ahead, travel is in his blood. He was born in Paris and lived in France for seven years, moved to the UK for a short time, then spent seven years in the Middle East. His mother was a dental assistant and always managed to find a job quickly in those new places. As she reasoned, everyone in the world has teeth, and the opportunity to work in different countries while maintaining a reasonably healthy work-life balance –at least compared to those in medicine –was one of the reasons Jacques decided to study dentistry after completing his first year of health science in Dunedin.
While things have tightened up considerably since then and accredited qualifications are often required to work in different countries, Jacques can see himself overseas in the future. He spent six months working in Australia in early 2023 and loved it. Whatever he ends up doing, it will require balancing his desire to do good through the public system with his need to pay off the investment he’s made in his own training.“There’s a lot more out there to see,” he says. Fortunately for us and our health sector, he still sees New Zealand as home. It’s pretty clear we’re lucky to have him.