Next entry for my DCT competition... with Dayna Rosenthal.

My name is Dayna and I am currently working as a Community Dental Officer in Whittington Health NHS Trust. I recently completed my DCT2 in OMFS at Royal Free Hospitals (Barnet & Chase Farm) and prior to that, I completed a DCT1 in Special Care Dentistry in Buckinghamshire. I chose to go down the DCT path for many reasons:

Prepare yourself as I take you through a week as an Oral and Maxillo-facial Surgery (OMFS) DCT in Royal Free Hospitals...

Monday: Following a previous week of theatres, which may include orthognathic, trauma and neoplasm surgeries, I have a zero day to relax. Hurrah! 

Tuesday: I can't go too wild on my zero day since I am on call in the morning. After receiving the handover, I dash to the emergency theatre board where all the specialities fight for the right for their patients to be treated first. After my best pitch, I attend ward round with the OMFS team and update our inpatients' plans. If the notoriously loud bleep sounds, I have to prioritise when to attend to it. Juggling these tasks definitely improved my multi-tasking and prioritising skills, which I believe are transferable anywhere. Later, I carry out biopsies, complex extractions and extractions on complex patients on my own local anaesthesia list.

Wednesday: Paediatric day surgery. I work with the paediatric nurses, anaesthetists, operating department practitioners and recovery team a lot on these days. This was my favourite list, since I gained some really valuable and interesting surgical experience under general anaesthetic including odontomas and ectopic canines!

Thursday: I join the team at 8am for ward rounds followed by a day on clinic, which is a lucky dip of dental, oral medicine and maxillo-facial pathologies. TMJD, lichen planus and painful wisdom teeth are commonly encountered, and seeing these on a regular basis consolidated my knowledge and communication with these patients and helped me understand appropriate and inappropriate referrals. I also see weird and wonderful pathologies that I thought I would only ever see in a text book, including odontogenic keratocysts and pemphigus. There is always a consultant or registrar around to assess the patients with you , and to learn from a patient in the flesh is a unique and unforgettable experience!

Friday, Saturday & Sunday: Being on call over a weekend is unpredictable. Some weekends are extremely busy with very unwell patients and some are so quiet that I bleep myself just to ensure that my bleep still worked. The on call DCT is responsible for managing the inpatients and patients that come through A&E. A normal weekend may include a few dental abscesses, lacerations, facial fractures and the odd (very satisfying) sebaceous cyst. I learned how to manage these cases and look out for more serious cases such as retrobulbar haemorrhage and Ludwig's Angina. If the on call is quiet (never say the 'q' word), I join the rest of the department for teaching where we have some amazing speakers and even some plating courses! I was fortunate to be able to get involved in some great audits and clinical governance projects and even deliver teaching sessions to my colleagues. 

With no previous OMFS experience, I was petrified about what I had signed up for at the start of DCT, but left feeling confident, with a host of invaluable practical and life skills within my armamentarium. After my OMFS DCT post, a fellow DCT and I set up a paediatric dental educational blog to update and empower dentists in providing good quality paediatric dentsitry in primary care, ToothFaiRead, which can be found on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. 

Thanks Dayna for your entry! Inspiring work by a fellow dental blogger! Look out for still more entries to come. There's also still time to enter if you are a DCT...