 Hello everybody, Andrea Mayesca here with Dental L. So let me talk to you guys about my personal experience with keeping, maintaining, and writing the dental hygiene portfolio. So depending on where you live, this might not be needed for you. So if you've never heard of being audited or the dental hygiene portfolio, the Quality Assurance Program. If this is all foreign to you, then you probably don't have to worry about it. But I live in Canada, so we need to maintain a dental hygiene portfolio. Or now they have changed it where if you get audited, you can take what's called a Quality Assurance Exam. So you don't have to maintain the portfolio, but you would take an exam instead and, of course, hopefully pass it to be able to maintain your license. But for the purpose of this video, I'm going to be talking about my experience with the dental hygiene portfolio so you know what to expect. The good, the maybe not so good, but I'm going to help to walk you guys through this. So before I continue, if you need help with your dental hygiene portfolio, I do have a full course online where I go through everything with you. So so much more than what I'm going to talk about in the video today. So I can leave the link for you guys for that on the bottom. I do have a course if you want to take the Quality Assurance Exam instead, so I'll leave that link for you guys too. But OK, so I was audited in 2014. It's 2019 now. I have been audited again for the 2020 audit year. So they say that it is random selection, but I know a lot of hygienists who were last audited like never because this hasn't been a thing that's been happening forever. I know hygienists who have been practicing for 40 years and they were audited once. I know hygienists who have been practicing for two years and they have been audited already, so you never know. But it's not a scary thing. It can be scary if you're that hygienist that doesn't attend courses, that doesn't care to learn about new things, who doesn't attend convention, who doesn't update CPR, who's not doing what they should be doing. I'm one of those hygienists where I appreciate the dental hygiene portfolio because it kind of forces us to do a good job. It forces us to learn more. It forces us to do as much as we possibly can. You're probably not going to be a very good hygienist if you never take any courses, if you don't think to learn about new technologies, new systems happening. I will even leave just the other day. I was talking to a dental rep for a company and I was asking about a chlorhexamine rinse and they kind of said to me like, oh, have you looked at the more recent research that has been done saying that the rinse can actually be toxic to the tissues and it doesn't help healing that much. It might help a little bit because it does pretty much kill everything but it kills everything. Sometimes you need some of that left to actually promote proper healing but I kind of talked about that in another video so I won't go too much on chlorhexamine. But that's actually one of my topics for my portfolio because when she told me that, it kind of opened up my eyes like, oh my goodness, I thought chlorhexamine was all about perio, all about this. You're saying that it's toxic to the tissues, how did I not know this because I didn't look into it. But once I started looking into it, I'm like, oh my goodness, there's so many different articles here. But there's also a different type of chlorhexamine, a chlorhexidine varnish that doesn't have the same side effects as chlorhexidine gluconate rinse. So it does actually heal the tissues, but it doesn't kill off everything. But again, sorry guys, that's kind of another, oh, I got something stuck in my teeth. Sorry, that was weird. Okay, hold on a second. Sorry guys. Oh my gosh, awkward. I just took that out of my teeth. I just had a salad. So I apologize. You guys have probably looked at that this whole time. They didn't even notice. But anyways, again, another video for another day, but that's a perfect example of I need to be doing my research. Now, the portfolio isn't scary to me because I take courses all the time. I'm that person where I'm getting ready in the morning and instead of listening to the news, I will have a dental course on my laptop and I'm listening to it. I take the exam so that I get the certificate when I come home or, you know, something like that. Viva learning.com is excellent to just listen to a bunch of different topics and you don't have to pay for them. How amazing is that? It is such an amazing resource for us. Definitely have a look. And another thing about the portfolio is looking at that, looking at the website, Viva learning.com, even if you don't know where to start with your portfolio, you can see different topics there. And you can see kind of what topics interest you or what you really know nothing about, but you know you should. So use those topics for one of your topics for your portfolio because you do need to have 75 hours over the three years. They don't all have to be the 75 hours in one year or they can be because they understand that one year we might be doing other things that we didn't take any courses. That's okay. So that's why they say as long as it's 75 hours over three years, you need to have different topics to talk about. If you have three topics, that's okay, but you better have a lot of a lot of hours for those topics. If you're saying you learned about different oral cancer screening techniques and you have 30 hours that you learned all of those techniques on. Well, you better have articles to prove that you better have on course, you know, training. So depending on how many hours you are allotting to your topics. Your research needs to prove that, you know, I tend to do it a little bit smaller where I talk about a lot of topics that I am personally interested in. But there may be like two hours each topic because I didn't spend 10 hours doing research on chlorhexidine and what other forms I can use. If a patient has perio, they need something else, but I don't want to use the chlorhexidine rinse because it's toxic to the tissues. Is there something else I can use? So I did all of that research on my own. Did it take me 10 hours? No. I think for that one I said about three hours, which is true because I had watched two different webinars, which were about 45 minutes each. I took notes based on that. I write about an hour of, you know, articles in total, you know, that type of thing. But I teach you guys how to do that in the portfolio course that I do have. So I kind of teach you guys different topics you can use. Don't use the same topics, but think, okay, well, she's talking about oral cancer. She's talking about different techniques that can be done. Now I talk about oral cancer and how to recognize the early signs on young adults, you know, something like that. The more specific you are, the better. But I teach you guys how to do that too. I teach you guys how to unlock the right amount of hours per course. If you're saying you're only spending half an hour per topic, well, that's not going to get you very far either. They're not going to like that. And they will probably call you afterwards and say, okay, you're taking 20 topics. You're learning about them for half an hour and then moving on. What's the point? Pick something else. So my experience with the portfolio was, and again, this is in 2014. I obviously passed it, but I was very thorough. I was very specific. But back then I was tutoring also and I had used tutoring as part of my study knowledge. When I would teach a course, I would obviously have to look in textbooks, look in my notes and write up PowerPoints based on that course. So I'm also teaching myself. I'm sort of reteaching myself all of these topics. So I had actually used that as part of my hours with the portfolio and they had sent me a letter saying, well, you can't do that because you're being paid to tutor. I didn't be being paid to do the research. That makes sense. And at the time I didn't know that it's not like there's tons of tutors out there that I can ask these questions to write so that taught me. So I did have to redo some amount of hours. But once I did that, they were happy with it, you know, I remembered I took a course that the CDHO or CDHA sorry, actually offers on how to start your independent practice. So what was it? No, how to become a self initiated dental hygienist. So I took that course and that allowed me to be self initiated. I believe it was 30 hours, but that's an easy 30 hours right there. The course is very dry. I probably fell asleep a couple of times, but you get the idea. At least I was able to get my hours in. Last year I took a course of how to start your own independent dental hygiene practice. I had to double check the hours on that, but I started my own practice last year. So it made sense to take that course. I paid for it, you know, everything and I did learn a lot from it. And those hours I can use for my portfolio because I did start my own practice. So that's a perfect topic. Like just to think of different topics, right, like I could have said, I want to learn how to start my own dental hygiene practice. I could have said I am going to learn how to become a independent dental hygienist and potentially start my own practice. I was more specific because I wanted and do have my own mobile practice. So that was part of my topic statement is I want to learn how to be independent mobile dental hygiene practice. And then other topics that I had to was I want to learn how to get into nursing home so that I can go to nursing homes and clean their teeth because there's a huge barrier to care. Another topic that I did have was to do the research and find out who could benefit from me going to their home being a mobile dental hygienist. See how taking that one course me starting my own practice just opened up a bunch of topics and that was all for for last year. I have more than 75 hours for sure, but you know you get the idea me doing up my practice or sorry my office office manuals is part of me doing the research. You know all of those different products to learn about the products put that in a book, you know that's all part of the portfolio. So my experience with the portfolio is as long as you are organized, you will be fine, but a little tip, even if you're not organized at all, even if you have all of your courses, certificates and things in a binder in a box, whatever. Now is the perfect time to start don't start later, start now, even move backwards so a lot of people say that you should come up with your goal statements. First, what I tend to do is I tend to look for courses that I am interested in, and then say oh okay so I took courses on how to start my own independent practice. And then I took a course on how to deal with nursing home patients, how to handle seniors, how to do this, this and this and this right well that's all kind of into one topic. So that is a perfect goal statement for my portfolio, whereas I didn't necessarily think of having that as a goal statement before, but it makes sense because that's where I had allotted all of my hours to. Does that make sense you guys. If you need help though I am going to leave the link for you guys for the course on the bottom because I do walk you through everything. I have at least a webinar will actually there's plenty of webinars I'm just trying to think of how many I upload a month a lot. So there's always new ones so once you're inside the course you don't have to think that there's old lectures from like 2018 no they're all new I do still have some older ones in there. In case there's certain topics that you kind of want to look at that's from last year which is still not old right, but there's always new things coming so your mind is constantly thinking of new things. It is July, yes you have lots of time but now is the time to do it because we know once September starts you know school starts Christmas holidays that's the last thing you're going to want to do so now is the time do a little bit each day even do like two hours of work a week on your portfolio and eventually it will be done but I kind of teach you guys to inside the course like how to be organized and do it step by step. So you can say okay well this week I'm going to work on my goal topic number one, I'm going to watch two webinars while I'm getting ready for work on this and this topic here are the links to the webinars. I'm going to write up my notes afterwards you know that type of thing right so there's lots to learn it's easy to be organized but that's my experience with the portfolio is it's not that it's not a scary thing that everybody thinks it is even if they call you or send you a letter and say okay we didn't understand this part of your goal you need to read you these hours. So what you know what do them you guys they are here to help us they are here to make sure that we know our stuff and make sure that we are up to date obviously for the public. There's nothing bad there's nothing wrong with that so don't be afraid to take your portfolio I tell people though if taking the portfolio gives you anxiety. Definitely take the quality assurance exam instead because they do offer us they do allow us to do either that or the portfolio. But if exams cause you anxiety then you should do the portfolio so it just kind of depends on what you want to do. So thank you guys for watching let me know though if there's any questions and I'll leave those links for you guys on the bottom. I will talk to you very soon.