Dental Hygienist Beliefs

Exceptional dental hygiene care practice can assure that my patients are able to preserve their smile for their lifetime. This is a commitment that involves both the health care provider and the patient. As the dental hygienist, my personal commitment should be to strive for excellent patient care and commitment to continuing education which allows professionals to expand their foundations of knowledge and stay au courant on new developments in this rapidly changing field. My first job was at the age of 18 where I worked part-time as a dental assistant while attending college. At that time, I had recently moved to this country from Brazil and my academic and career objectives were very unsettled. The experiences I encountered while working
as a Registered Dental Assistant over the following 3 years has had the greatest influence on my ethical and moral values. Throughout the years that followed, I learned to recognize my strengths and also my weaknesses.
Being self-aware and having the ability to recognize my own weaknesses is an important quality on its own. This has helped me achieve my objectives both in my academic and in my personal life because once I acknowledged my limitations and weaknesses, I was then able to work on improving them or seek help when I needed to. Morals are rules of conduct that distinguish what is right or wrong, while ethics is a system of morals. It is possible to have morals without ethics, but one cannot have ethics without morals. I take pride at being a moral and ethical person, which are both essential characteristics that all health care providers should possess. My experience with working directly with patients throughout the past years made me realize how much trust did both patients and employers/instructors had on me. As a health care worker, my duty is to always make the right choices and to place my patient’s welfare above my own
interests. While seeking excellence and perfection can be most often thought to be a desired trait, I have learned that being overly critical of my own work can be as much as a weakness as it is a strength. Having unrealistic expectations of how something should be done and what the results should be can often leave you with a feeling of failure and of unaccomplishment. While performing a given task, I often find myself stressed and spending more time than I should over small and insignificant details. In the past, this behavior has caused me to either miss a deadline or led me to miss the big picture. Being able to efficiently speak in public can have profound benefits for a persons’ career success.
It allows you to influence the world around you and it allows you to develop leadership skills. Despite my numerous other weaknesses, my most conspicuous one has to be my petrifying fear of public speaking. For my first couple of years in college, I was under the false impression that I was done with having to do public speeches once I started dental hygiene school. To my misfortune, I learned right away that this could not be farther from the truth. Having such anxiety is definitely a disadvantage, but over the past semesters I have learned to acknowledge this weakness and accept that public speaking is inevitable and that I must learn how to cope with it and work harder to overcome my
fears. Ultimately, my goal is to find myself in a position where I am capable of growing professionally and I am given the opportunity to take on new challenges. At present time, I would like to overcome my public speaking anxiety, acquire as many certifications available within my profession, and learn an advantageous foreign language. First and foremost, I would like to get my local anesthesia certification even thought I have no plans to move out of state. There is a high possibility that within the next years, such expanded function will be granted to dental hygienists in the state of Texas. Furthermore, I would like to learn a fourth language because it would give me great advantage in the work place. According to a count done in 2003 by Rice University, Houston is the most racially and ethnically diverse city in America. I am currently fluent in both Portuguese and Spanish, which has really come in hand for me numerous times while at school and at work. I would like to see myself at a general family practice working alongside a trustworthy employer who is an ethical and a devoted dentist. Also, I would seek for an employer who is able to respect and trust my judgment as a health care professional. In the past, I have experience a little of both worlds. I have worked with great dentists who recognized their dental hygienists competence to make the right judgment within their scope of practice. These dentists made for great employers because they worked as a team and valued the knowledge and opinion of their employers. However, I have also worked with authoritarian dentists who preferred to make all decisions on their own and whom will often demean their employees’ ability to make any decision. For that reason, the practice that I choose to work for should be run by an ethical, respectful, and dedicated dentist who is a team player.