Life at Work

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...

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...

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...

We all go through our days capping our frustrations from those unexpected little annoyances, aka pet peeves. A pet peeve is defined as “a minor annoyance that individuals identify as particularly annoying to them, to a greater degree than others may find.” Whether you are driving in your car and someone pulls out in front of you, only to turn...

The clock is ticking along rather quickly in the dental operatory when your next patient arrives before you have even scheduled your current patient’s next appointment. The operatory needs proper disinfecting, you’re thirsty, and you need to use the restroom. Once again, your needs will have to wait. There is little, if any, downtime for hygienists in busy practices. If...

The race of the clock, the fifth glare you've given your doctor in the last 10 minutes, the sweat dripping down your back, the panic rising, the need to strip off your lab coat and turn on your fan immediately, the pacing, the frantically trying to find and set up another op for your next patient. TIME MANAGEMENT -...

Managing our time effectively in patient care is stressful, tiresome, and can often be out of our control. In 2018, Nayaka describes time management as planning available time in conjunction with personal goals while keeping individual likes, dislikes, and preferences in mind.1 She also states that good time management results in less stress, greater productivity, and improved efficiency. In hygiene...

Everyone knows that feeling you get when you walk into a space that is cluttered, crowded, or disheveled. A little anxiety starts to bubble up, and you immediately want to leave or start cleaning. You don’t want to have this feeling when you walk into your workspace, and you certainly don’t want your patients to feel that way. You...