Video Transcript
Hi, my name is Michael Filosi, and I’m one of the dentists at Fullarton Park Dental. I wanted to do a video today on hygienists, dental hygienists and their role in a dental practice.
The first question that a lot of people have is what does a dental hygienist do and how is their role different to what a dentist does. The easiest way to explain that, a dental hygienist is specifically trained in cleaning the soft tissues around your teeth, so the gums, and the bone support around there, whereas the dentist tends to do more with the hard tissues, so the teeth and things like fillings, and those sorts of things.
So hygienists are clinicians that are trained to help you keep the supporting structures around your teeth and the gums and the teeth in the best possible condition, nice and clean, and to also help to with preventative maintenance, to chat to patients about how best to look after their teeth.
Those supporting structures are really important as part of a healthy mouth, to keep them really healthy. The thing with gum disease is it doesn’t tend to be painful until it’s too late, so keeping up with your active maintenance and seeing a hygienist for your cleans helps a lot to keep your teeth clean and stop you having any future troubles.
To be honest, before I joined Fullarton Park Dental, I actually hadn’t worked in a practice with hygienists before, and so it took me a little bit of time just to kind of get my head around about their role, how helpful they are, and how good they are at their jobs. And now I can very happily and proudly say that when I have my teeth cleaned, I have one of our hygienists do it.
So we’ve got Tamara, Michelle and Kylie who are all excellent and do a really good job. And to be honest, as a dentist, we learn a lot about the technical skills of dentistry, but in terms of trying to explain and teach people how to look after their teeth better, the hygienists I’ve found, or certainly our hygienists, do a much better job at that, it’s really that simple.
So, I’m really glad that we’ve got them here and really proud of the work they do in helping to improve patients’ overall oral health and the state of their mouths. So, hopefully that helps to answer any questions you have about the role of a hygienist and what they do as part of a dental team.
If you need your teeth cleaned, by all means, get in touch, and we can organise a time to have your next clean with a hygienist, and I also had the question from one of our previous videos. If you think that this would be helpful to anyone else you know, by all means, feel free to share it or tag them in it. That’s perfectly fine with me.
So, I’m Michael from Fullarton Park Dental, and we’ll see you in the next video. Take care.
