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. 

Laura Horton began her career in 1996 as a regular dental nurse but today has built her way up to be an inspiring business owner and consultant. Her career opened her eyes to many different dental environments from the NHS, mixed, community, hospital, private, cosmetic and orthodontic practices. Through her wide range of experiences Laura gained a great passion and a considerable amount of knowledge of the dentistry industry. In 2004 Laura became a Treatment Coordinator, a job she loved. It was through her experience as a Treatment Coordinator that she developed the basis of her business idea: that all practices could benefit from a position like hers.