Welcome to the Dental Nurse Business Page

We need an Oral Health Service built around prevention — and dental nurses can help deliver it.
Take a look at the services listed on the Dental Health Service website and see how many you could already provide, or could provide with additional training and appropriate support.
With further training, such as fluoride varnish, dental nurses can play a much bigger role in prevention, palliative oral care, teledentistry, digital records and both synchronous and asynchronous health screening.
We are starting in care homes, because the need is obvious and the potential benefit is considerable. But this should only be the beginning.
Portable oral healthcare can go almost anywhere — into care homes, people’s homes, community centres, schools and workplaces. Teledentistry, digital scanning and preventive care can potentially support people of all ages.
Technology and AI will help us organise information and communicate more effectively, but they cannot replace the empathy, judgement and reassurance of a caring human being.
If you would like to do more, develop your skills and potentially earn more, spend 30 minutes exploring this section and decide whether this model could work for you.
You do not need a large clinic to begin. You need appropriate training, good governance, the right equipment, professional registration and a safe connection with the wider dental team.
You can also register and appear on the Dental Health Service website free of charge.
Sir John Timpson describes an upside-down organisation where the people closest to the customer are trusted and empowered to make decisions. It worked for him, it can work for us. The only difference is....
You can keep the money you earn.

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Listen to Sir John Timpson's 30 min podcast on how to run a Service

This is one of many interviews with Sir John Timpson.
Click on the picture to listen to his insight.
and about upside down management with a team of colleagues.

If you think after listening to this, you realise that you have the freedom to spend as much time as you want with the resident, and charge as much or as little you feel appropriate.Then the best way to learn is as small peer review groups. Search Peer Review and how to set it up.

You will enjoy the greater variety to your working life and .....

PAY IT FORWARD

Start Your journey here

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THE 3 MAIN SERVICES you can deliver are on the dentalhealthservice.org and care4teeth.org webites. There are links to teledentistry, 3d scanning, and SDF varnish.These are a few YouTube  shorts on what we could do.

SThis is a longer podcast with Sir John Timpson talking to Holly Tucker in "Conversations of Inspiration". It's more focussed on the town centres post covid, and redeveloping the centres.
Health hubs with digital tools including scanners, BP monitors, Saliva testing, ultrsasound, digital radiographs and the accompanying AI assessments software that the public can store themselves and possibly agree to share to help improve all our wellbeing.
At the end he gives a letter to his younger self. I asked AI to reproduce it, but for copyright reasons it wouldn't but it made a similar one for someone like me. Its pretty close, the bit in brackets was from my Dad when I was a student and was the most insightful advice I had from anyone .  We now would call it behavioural science.
It helped me cope and deal with patients anxiety, and not take their anxiety home with me.
Back then it came under the umbrella term of "common sense."
Sir John Timpson talks about it a lot.🤔

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Letter to my younger self- what would AI write for you?

Dear Tony,
You are about to spend the next forty years working in dentistry.
You think your job will mainly be about teeth. It won’t.

It will be about people.
(Remember the people you see will behave differently as they aren't seeing you, they are meeting a dentist)

You will meet frightened children, anxious adults, exhausted parents, people in pain, people with dementia, people who have been forgotten by the system, and people who simply need someone to listen.
You will learn how to repair teeth, replace them, straighten them and take them out. But eventually you will realise that the best dentistry is often the dentistry you never have to do.
Prevention really is better than cure.
You will also discover that healthcare systems do not always make prevention easy. They become complicated. Rules multiply. Targets appear. Forms get longer. People spend more time proving they have done something than actually doing it.
Don’t become too cynical about this. Most people inside the system are trying to do their best.
But never assume that because something has always been done a particular way, it is the best way.
Keep asking the awkward question:
Could we make this simpler?
You will eventually realise that the most important people in any health service are often those closest to the patient.
The dental nurse who notices something isn’t right.
The carer who cleans someone’s teeth every evening.
The receptionist who hears the worry in someone’s voice.
The hygienist or therapist who has time to explain something properly.
These people don’t always need more instructions.
Sometimes they need more trust.
Give good people clear boundaries, proper training and responsibility, then let them use their judgement.
You will spend part of your career thinking that change comes from the top.
Later you will realise that most useful change starts at the bottom.
One person sees a problem.
Another person tries something different.

Someone else improves it.
And eventually something that looked impossible becomes normal.
Technology will change dramatically during your lifetime.
You will go from handwritten notes and X-ray films to digital scanners, smartphones, artificial intelligence and conversations with computers.
Don’t be frightened by it.
Technology is only useful if it helps people.
Use it to make knowledge easier to find.
Use it to connect people who cannot easily reach a dentist.
Use it to help carers, nurses and families prevent problems before they become emergencies.
And remember that the cleverest technology in the world is useless without kindness.
There will be failures.
Some ideas won’t work.
Some people will think you are mad.
Some will tell you why something cannot be done before you have finished explaining it.
Listen to criticism when it is useful.
Ignore it when it is simply fear dressed up as wisdom.
You will also discover something else.
You don’t have to have all the answers.
In fact, the older you get, the more comfortable you should become saying:
“I don’t know — but perhaps we can find out.”
Look after your family.
Look after your friends.
Work matters, but not quite as much as you sometimes think it does.
And when you eventually step away from clinical dentistry, don’t assume your useful life is finished.
You may actually have more freedom to ask the questions you were too busy to ask before.
How could dentistry reach people who never come through the surgery door?
How could we support carers looking after vulnerable people?
How could we stop dental disease rather than repeatedly repair it?
How could nurses, hygienists, therapists and dentists work together without unnecessary hierarchy?
How could we create a health service that starts with the person rather than the organisation?
You won’t solve all of these problems.
That doesn’t matter.
Just keep nudging things in the right direction.
If I could give you one piece of advice, it would be this:
Trust people more.
Most people want to do a good job.
Give them the knowledge.
Give them the tools.
Give them sensible boundaries.
Then get out of their way.
And never forget what took you forty years to properly understand.
Dentistry is not really about teeth.
It is about helping people live healthier, happier lives.
The teeth are simply where we start.
Tony