WDHA Newsletter

Dear Colleagues’

As a new year is upon so is the forever changing demands on us as professionals... Each day when we enter our place of employment, a tremendous amount of stress and responsibility is placed upon us. Not only by our co-therapist who employ us but our co-workers and our clients. We must review medical history, do a complete periodontal, radiographic, and oral cancer screening. We educate, provide treatment, and review treatment with both the Dr. and the patients. We then have to keep accurate and legible chart files, clean our rooms, sterilize our instruments, and in most offices cross train the other areas of the office. If you think about it we are able and most of us do everything other then drill and fill teeth. We are the only professional in the dental office that can and will do it all, and lets not forget we have to do it all on the patient who is 10 min late, has not been in for 2yrs and needs to be out 15 minutes before the scheduled appointment will be over and has a broken tooth they want the Dr. to fix TODAY. While we don’t have the responsibility of the overhead and insurance of running the dental office, we are the front line fighters in disease prevention and patient retention. If you ask 9 out of 10 patients why they stay in and office… The answer is the dental hygienist. I know I am not telling any of you something you are not aware of and don’t feel on a daily basis. It’s frustrating at times, but I am a firm believer in we are not given more then we can handle. When the daily demands of our profession get you down, they usually will carry over in your personal life and that is something we are probably all guilty of. As working professionals, we have all the demands of our employment and then must go home, prepare dinner, clean the house, pay the bills , play taxi mom/dad and as we grow older take care of our family to name a few. While our family wants to listen to our professional worries, they just don’t quite understand the day to day changes and demands of our profession. That is why networking with other dental hygiene professionals is so important to our survival in the dental world. This is why I urge you to come out and attend CE lectures, events and mentoring programs. With this being said, I urge you all to come out and network and attend our very well presented CE courses, offer to help on our board and come and meet other professionals like yourselves who love what they do. I wish you all a happy and healthy and great “08”.
Hoping to see you in March.

Lynda Lederer-Natale, RDH
President WDHA