‘My brilliant career’

With more than 20 years’ experience as a dental nurse, Katy Schulze is practice manager and treatment advisor at Pure Dental Health in Truro in Cornwall. Katy is qualified in dental radiography, oral health education, fluoride application, plaque and debris scoring, impression taking, dental photography, cannulation and venepuncture, and dental sedation, and is also one of the practice’s named first aiders. Here, she shares her ‘brilliant career’.

Dentistry was very different when my career began. NHS dentists were commonplace, the NHS system worked well and the industry as a whole was less regulated than it is today – and dental nurses didn’t have to be qualified or registered with the GDC. I started training to be a dental nurse in 1998 and qualified in 2000, having secured a position in an orthodontic practice.