Life at Work

The question comes up a lot: How do I expand my career outside of the clinical setting? It is quite difficult to answer this question. Not because there are no opportunities, there’s actually many. It’s because there’s no one-size-fits-all answer to answer this question. It really depends on you, as an individual; including your particular goals, expectations, skillset, and what...

Being a dental hygienist can obviously be tiring. Seeing patient after patient can slowly chip away at your positivity. Having to work with negative co-workers, or people you don’t get along with makes everything that much more difficult. Dealing with problem patients, staying on schedule, and having to put up with not-so-kind coworkers in the office can make work an...

There’s a wide range of emotions that can come from being a dental hygienist. From dealing with co-workers, staying on schedule, the satisfaction of a patient improving their homecare, or the opposite – a patient not caring in the slightest about their health. However, there’s one emotion that can be hard to deal with because it continues to grow...

We’ve all worked with that person who acts as if they know everything. They speak in a condescending tone and are convinced they are 100% correct at all times. We all know that disgusted, irritated feeling we get when encountering these types of people. But have you stepped back and asked yourself whether you’ve been acting like that? It’s always...

As dental hygienists, we respect the doctor we work for. After all, it is their practice, their business, and we work either under direct or indirect supervision of them. They are the boss. Because of this respect, some topics that are hard or just plain uncomfortable to bring up with them. We might also hold back because we don’t...

For many dental hygienists, downtime in your clinical schedule is a bittersweet concept—too much of it and you risk a cut in hours, too little of it and you balance precariously on the edge of exhaustion. Between patients canceling at the last minute, the inevitable “forgotten” dental appointment, and the natural ebb and flow of slow and busy seasons,...

Many dental hygienists are going through a crisis as our profession is filled with uncertainty, fear, anxiety, and sadness in the midst of a global pandemic. We are at a standstill with many of us out of work and unsure of when we will be able to start working again. During all of this, I have noticed a trend...

Hygiene wages are often set to equal a third of hygiene production. This benchmark, cited frequently in the dental industry, is a yardstick for salary discussions. What happens when the practice contracts with a number of PPO plans that pay below average for hygiene services? Is it still fair to use a below average reimbursement model when determining fair...

I want to talk about a subject nearly untouched in the dental world, grief. I went into dentistry because I feared I would have been too emotional to handle nursing. I felt dentistry was a safer choice. I could still help and serve others but without the messy emotions associated with losing patients. Right? I decided a long time ago...

We are in a new decade, in case you haven’t heard, which by the way, is debatable as some say the decade begins in 2021. That would be helpful to alleviate all this pressure, wouldn’t it? The voice of reinvention is loud – Be bold! Move on! All this forward-thinking can be the catalyst to begin a new future,...