SNORING & SLEEP APNOEA: A ROLE FOR THE DENTAL TECHNICIAN. BY MATT EVERATT, EDITOR Leave a comment
The first in the series of free webinars in conjunction with The Dental Technician Magazine and ProDental CPD.
Several months ago we (The Dental Technician Magazine) were approached by Rob Dyas of ProDental CPD. ProDental CPD provide online CPD for Dentists and Dental Professionals. Rob, a practicing Oral Surgeon, wanted to offer free CPD sessions for Dental Technicians and wanted to join forces with the magazine to provide speakers for Dental Technicians.
I suppose it was inevitable that I was going to be the ‘Guinea Pig’ so to speak! My main area of interest is Snoring and Sleep Apnoea, I thought it best we open with this subject.
The content of the sessions was designed to give Dental Technicians a basic background on Snoring & Sleep Apnoea, to discuss the aetiology, signs and symptoms and current treatments available.
There was around 50 delegates attending the lunchtime session, the difficult thing for me, I’d much rather speak to people in the flesh. For others I would imagine presenting to a blank screen is much less daunting.
The session went according to plan, I asked that all questions be saved until after the session, this way I don’t get distracted as I have a tendency to go off subject, I am easily distracted these days! The format of the session allows attendees to build up questions as the presentation goes on, it is great as it builds a bank of questions to go through at the end. In teaching terms, it is always good to recap and go back over some of the most important aspects.
I think the subject and content was well received and judging by the number of questions it seemed that everyone enjoyed the session.
We covered lots of background information on Snoring and Sleep Apnoea and closed the session with lots of examples of different Mandibular Advancement Splints available to Laboratories to offer their customers. We looked at varying degrees of clinical efficacy, listing the pro’s and con’s of each design. The hope being more technicians will consider offering these devices to their own customers.
The session was recorded allowing attendees to watch it back, particularly great if they had to leave the session or didn’t quite understand any particular aspect. It is also available for Dental Technicians that couldn’t make the live session.
I thoroughly enjoyed delivering the session and I am looking forward to being an attendee listening to future speakers, particularly as its FREE CPD! I would really like to encourage others to come forward and offer a presentation. It is a great way to start out if you have never done any public speaking before, you essentially sit talking to your computer screen for 1 hour. Some may say its therapeutic!
I wanted to say a special thank you to Rob Dyas and his amazing team at ProDental CPD and Chris Trowbridge from The Dental Technician Magazine team for seeing this vision through to actually delivering the first free CPD event. Another huge thank you to WHW for their sponsorship of the lecture. They are Exclusive suppliers of The Sleepwell MAS discussed on the webinar.
Our hope is to bring a monthly webinar, to keep them free and deliver interesting content for our readers. If you think you could help us by offering to deliver a webinar, please do get in touch with us via email editor@dentaltechnician.org.uk
