What’s your role?

At the moment I work at a single handed practice. I am the Lead Nurse and the Infection Control Specialist.

How long have you been a dental nurse?

I’ve been a dental since 1992, since I was sixteen. I’ve never really had a career break from dentistry. I did go into teaching for while.

What’s your role?

My title is the Clinical Treatment Coordinator and I am also the Training Manager of the practice. I work at JM Dental Care in Sutton, Coldfield.

How long have you been a dental nurse?

I’ve been a dental nurse for seventeen years now.

How did you start out as a dental nurse?

I first started dental nursing at sixteen when I left school. My aunty got me the job and it just began as a saturday job. However, I really enjoyed it so I soon began working full time. I had to travel quite a lot so I moved practices and worked for another three years in a different practice. I then fell pregnant so took some time out.

Did you go back to dental nursing?

Yes. I ended up going back to nursing part time, working two days a week.

We all think being a dental nurse is about sucking spit and scrubbing instruments and when I first started in practice it pretty much was. However, these days there is so much more to the role. Even starting out as a trainee there is so much to learn and many places the role can take you.

I have been working as a dental nurse for 12 years now, it is a job I fell into as a teenager. I first applied for a job as a receptionist, after leaving school. I ended up in surgery working with a real old school dentist. At 18 years old this was quite a scary experience but I survived, lived to tell the tale and enrolled on the Dental Nurse NVQ at the local college.

I was eighteen and in desperate need of a job because I wanted to move to Manchester. I was living in Bolton and had just finished my A Levels. I had decided that I really did not want to go to University. So after trawling through the newspapers I found a job advertised for a dental receptionist in the city centre. I was drawn to a caring profession and I thought maybe this was the first step to the career I wanted to build. I got the job and moved.