As a dental hygiene student and someone who is part of the dental hygiene community, I am extremely disappointed by this decision. Allowing dental assistants to take on scaling without the extensive education and clinical training required of dental hygienists raises serious concerns about patient safety and the quality of care.

Dental hygienists spend years receiving specialized education and hands-on clinical training in periodontal assessment, calculus detection and removal, instrumentation, oral pathology, patient education, and recognizing changes in a patient’s oral health. Scaling is not simply “cleaning teeth” it requires knowledge, skill, clinical judgment, and the ability to recognize when a patient’s condition requires further treatment or referral.

Dental assistants already have many important responsibilities within a dental office. Adding scaling to those responsibilities may make it even more difficult to prioritize thorough patient education and individualized preventive care. Dental hygienists are specifically trained to provide comprehensive preventive services and educate patients about their oral health.

Instead of reducing the standards for who can perform these procedures, we should be protecting patients by ensuring that anyone performing scaling has adequate education, training, and demonstrated competency. Expanding the scope of practice without equivalent educational requirements risks undermining the profession of dental hygiene and, most importantly, the quality of care our patients deserve. Patients deserve highly trained professionals not shortcuts when it comes to their health.

This decision should not be about replacing dental hygienists or finding shortcuts to address workforce shortages. The focus should be on investing in the dental hygiene workforce while maintaining high standards of patient care and safety.