Greed

The last two days I and many of the other hygiene students participated in the Women's Health Connection at a Midtown Clinic in Ogden. This is a non profit event that women can come to and get screened to determine what kind of health care needs they have. A case worker is then assigned to make sure that each woman receives the necessary care based on priority of their needs. Our job as hygiene students was to provide oral cancer screenings and determine who was highest priority for needing restorative dental work. This is an event that Weber State Dental Hygiene participates in every year and often many patients for the hygiene clinic are found though this event. Prior to the event our entire senior class had decided to pool all the patients we found and split evenly between all of the senior students. However during the event human nature set in and greed took over. I was quite upset when I found out part way through the day that most of the students had decided that they were no longer going to submit their patients to be divided up. Many of them had tried to make sure that they stayed in the same screening groups all day and were only going to split their names between their group. I however had been oblivious to this and had had many people rotate through my screening group who wrote down the names of many of the patients that I saw. So I didn't have those names and phone numbers even though I saw the patient. I hadn't cared because I thought that we were all sharing anyway. Yesterday I guess there were only seven Seniors there so those seven people got all of the names for the whole day which I believe they saw some where between 200-400 people. I am not sure exactly how many but I know it was a lot and that there is no way that those seven students will have time in their schedules to see all of the patients that came thought the Health Connection yesterday. I think the reason that this bothers me the most is that a small group of students were not able to gather names and numbers of patients because they were assigned to be in the halls to direct people to where we were doing the oral cancer screenings. Luckily for me I was not one of those people. I left the event with a list of names that had 11 people on it, I would have had more but like I said when I was seeing a patient usually their was someone writing for me and a bunch of people rotated through my group, so many of the names of the people I saw are on other people's lists. Still I feel pretty lucky to have 11 names some of the hall people may have only gotten 3 names, some students may not have gotten any. It just makes me so furious that the students who wrote down the most names are refusing to follow through with dividing up the patients like we had all originally agreed to . How would they feel if they had been assigned to the hall and left the event with no patient names? I feel like greed has turned a bunch of people in our class into jerks because there is no way that some of those students will be able to see all of the patients on their lists. There aren't enough clinic days. So I don't see why they can't pass those names on to the people who got few or none. That is my soap

Child's Play

Today I had one of the hardest appointments I have ever had in clinic. I saw a 6 year old boy who was very impatient and had a very strong gag reflex. After the cleaning I went to place sealants on his six year molars. I etched and then the tooth got contaminated with saliva because he closed down. So I grabbed a bite block and etched again. Then the boy felt like he was gaging sat up and spit my bite block on the floor. I then asked the clinic assistant Megan to help me. She suctioned and helped keep his mouth open. It took a lot of effort and a couple of more times etching, because he kept closing down, but we eventually were able to get the upper and lower 6yr molars on the pts. right side done. We tried to do the pts. left side but it was not working. We had etched twice and both times he gaged and closed down. He began crying and said he didn't want to do it anymore. His mom came over and talked to him but he was still not willing to let us seal the teeth. I told Professor Wold what was going on and that I just needed her to scale check so I could send him home. In the meantime the boys mom had got him distracted playing a video game on her phone. Professor Wold sat down to do the scale check and while the boy was distracted she rinsed, dried and sealed the two teeth. I asked her why she didn't re-etch because we were taught to always re-etch if the tooth got contaminated with saliva. She told me "sometimes you have to improvise." The teeth had already been etched twice so the enamel was slightly demineralized where the sealant was to be placed. I think it was wise of her to place the sealant even though she could not etch again because the worst that could happen is the sealant may come off. I think it will hold pretty well though. I guess we'll see next semester when they come back. I felt like this was a good learning experience for me because in real life following the "book answer" is not always practical; sometimes you have to adjust for the situation.