Introduction

Hello everyone and thank you so much for joining this two-part series brought to you by Crest. My name is Stephanie Botts. I am a practicing dental hygienist and ergonomic specialist. I'm so excited to be talking to you today about ergonomics. It's such an important topic and you'll never regret learning and investing in yourself. So I'd like to tell you just a little bit about me. So I have been a practicing dental hygienist for over 14 years and without, with the exception of the last year and a half that's all been full time, so four to five days a week. So I'm no stranger to the ergonomic challenges that we have in the operatory and also pain, and actually pain is the reason why I started working in ergonomics. I got to a point in my career where my pain was so bad and that it was either get out of dentistry or figure out what the heck is going on. So I started learning about ergonomics and making really small changes into my practice and that's what ergonomics is. It's not rocket science, there's no genius to it. It's very simple concepts, but these very small changes made a dramatic impact and how I feel and my energy levels and it really reignited the joy that I have in practicing dentistry. So with that experience, I decided to do something with ergonomics. So I started my company last year. It's called posture pros and what I'm doing now is ergonomic assessments and coaching and consulting to clinicians and also companies to help improve their ergonomics in dentistry. So it's been really fun. I'm still practicing. I still work about one day a week seeing patients, which I love. I love taking care of patients, but I also love taking care of clinicians. So it's been very rewarding for me.

So we do have several learning objectives for today's webinar. We're going to talk about the unique musculoskeletal disorders that affect us in dentistry because we are very special that way. We'll also talk about how to incorporate some chair side of micro breaks into your day, and I'll go more into what micro brakes are here in a little bit. And then we'll also talk about the multiple risk factors that are present that are working against us when practicing dentistry and also some strategies on how to overcome those risk factors.