Looking over the last 4 years of experience and education, I have adopted philosophy of care of building relationships with my colleagues, other professionals, and clients.

I believe that adopting a strong caring relationship would yield better outcomes in oral

Building a caring relationship is important for providing a holistic care

disease preventions, educations, and health promotion by stimulating critical thinking skills to truly understand the barriers that clients are facing in accessing dental hygiene care.

As Pai et al says, “the science of caring, has a humanistic and a scientific foundation,¹” I have used the concept of caring to understand ethics, interpersonal relationship and a dental hygiene intervention. I believe that caring practice, through a sense of being loved, encourages clients to improve their oral health in a more positive and cooperative manner. It also increases building rapports with not only clients but also coworkers by increasing honesty, integrity and trust. Establishment of such concrete inter-professional and client-practitioner relationships as well as viewing oral health problems via patients’ perspectives have allowed me to provide better catered care and to better advocate for the clients.

UBC Year 4 dental hygiene students
From left: Ms. Ahluwalia, Suji Kang, Michele Moreira, Michelle Foster, Therese Balleza, Kelsey Singer

Critical thinking is one of dental hygiene core competencies that I have been encouraged to adopt in my dental hygiene practice from my education. At the beginning, I had not a clear understanding of the importance of critical thinking skill on client care. However, after observing various populations with restraining factors in physical, social and mental aspects of health, I quickly have realized that critically assess what these populations will need from dental hygiene care is imperative to provide customized care for each population. Critical thinking also has allowed me to be a better care provider in the following aspects of inquisitiveness, systematicity, analyticity, truth-seeking, open-mindedness, self-confidence, and maturity. I believe that such reflections have allowed me to develop as a better clinical practitioner, educator, and advocator, and has encouraged me to be a life-long learner.

Thus, I envision my practice to continuously adopt the philosophy of caring model to all my clients, coworkers, and other healthcare professionals to provide the same quality of holistic care and relationships without holding any prejudice against sexual orientation, religion, beliefs, physical and mental status. I will be basing all my judgments and actions via critical thinking to uphold ethical and legal duties as a dental hygiene professional.

Reference

1. Pai HC, Eng CJ, Ko HL. Effect of caring behavior on disposition toward critical thinking of nursing students. J Prof Nurs. 2013 Nov-Dec;29(6):423-9. doi: 10.1016/j.profnurs.2012.05.006. Epub 2013 Sep 27.