Life at Work

At the end of every year, dental hygiene groups and forums are blowing up with questions concerning the 1099 they received from a dentist they worked for at some point that year. Most of these questions are regarding dentists that hired the hygienist on a temporary basis. Many of the responses focus on the legality of being paid with...

As dental hygienists, we wear some crazy hats. We may serve as the OSHA director, radiation officer, we might order supplies, can be a maintenance person, a sterilization guru, a front office assistant, and in some offices you may even serve as the janitor. At home, we are wife/husband, mother/father, daughter/son, friend, chauffeur, chef, maid, and coach. Balancing all...

As most typical teenagers, I toyed with many ideas throughout out my high school career. Initially, I wanted to do be an architect. After a brief job shadow with a local architect, I quickly realized the only thing appealing to me about that job was the electric eraser. Then I moved on to nursing around the same time my...

Dental hygiene has been known as a “mommy job” in my community. We don’t have to take call, we don’t have to work weekends, and most of us work part-time. I have known few hygienists who do work “full-time,” and most of them have expressed feeling what we like to call clinical “burnout.” They end up feeling the need...

I don’t know about you, but I only like drama on a stage, TV, in a movie, or in a book. Many of us work primarily in an office with women, and it can be a challenge with all that estrogen flowing. We spend more time with our co-workers than we do our own families. So how do we...

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...

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...

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...