The public needs to understand how we arrived at this point. The Virginia Dental Association actively pursued this legislation LEAVING OUT ANY COMMUNICATION WITH VDHA through the General Assembly rather than through the Virginia Board of Dentistry and the normal regulatory process. The result is a law that leaves the Board with very limited ability to address the serious concerns now being raised by dental hygienists, dentists and patients.

During the legislative process, lawmakers were given the impression that the Board of Dentistry would subsequently develop regulations addressing implementation and patient safeguards. Yet the legislation itself placed the essential requirements into statute. The Board cannot now rewrite the law, impose requirements the General Assembly did not authorize, or use a guidance document to create substantive regulations that conflict with the statute.

That distinction is extremely important. Many of the comments being submitted here criticize the Board as though the Board decided to allow dental assistants to perform supragingival scaling. It did not. The General Assembly did.

The VDA advocated for legislation that bypassed the Board’s normal regulatory process, while simultaneously creating an expectation that the Board would later address the details. That has placed the Board in an untenable position: the public is now asking it to provide protections that may be beyond what it legally can accomplish through guidance.

The Board should therefore use every bit of authority it does have to make the limitations unmistakable. Supragingival scaling by a statutorily qualified dental assistant is a narrowly authorized procedure. It is not dental hygiene licensure, it does not confer the broader education, assessment skills or scope of practice of a licensed dental hygienist, and it should never be represented to patients as equivalent to comprehensive dental hygiene care.

Going forward, legislators should understand the consequences of bypassing the regulatory expertise of the Board charged with protecting the public. A guidance document cannot repair deficiencies in a statute.