-: My name is Jessica Granda, and I'm a dental hygienist.
As a dental hygienist,
overall, I'm in charge of collecting medical history
for patients, I take x-rays,
I'm responsible for doing cleanings.
Expanded functions would be doing deep cleanings
or other sort of therapies to help get people healthy.
Currently, I work at a dental school
and I teach dental hygiene to future dentists.
So I was asked to participate in something called IPE.
It's basically an interprofessional relationship
that's created between dentists, doctors, nurses.
So what my job is as a faculty and
as a dental hygienist is to be that liaison
between the students and showing them how important it is
that once they graduate and obtain their licensures,
that they have to remember,
every profession has a limitation,
and with those limitations comes a responsibility to
refer your patient to the appropriate professional.
I have to prepare.
I'm sent case studies before we undergo these meetings
with the students and the other professions.
So it's a lot of preparing,
getting to know what exactly we're talking about,
and learning about the various disciplines
that are out there.
I used to work in a private practice
and my commute was a lot.
I would get up at five in the morning.
My first patient was at seven o'clock in the morning
and I probably wouldn't get home till about eight,
but that was in private practice, and now
that I work at a university, I am there from about eight
in the morning till about five in the afternoon.
So it's been a big shift.
It depends.
When you're in private practice
you have to be a little more flexible
than when you work for an institution.
There's a lot more structure in a school setting.