Please do not allow the licensure of dental assistants to be able to perform supra or subgingival scaling. As a dental hygienst we not only focus on debridement duties but patient safety and oral health education. Many assistants have been trained to do child prophylaxis but do not have the proper medical education/background to take a sufficent medical history and to know and recognize important medical issues that can affect dental health and will ultimately impact the way they educate the patient. With the emergence of the link between dental health and overall health in mainstream media patients have many specific questions about how their health is impacted by their periodontal/dental status. Since dental assistants are not required to know any medical background information how are they supposed to educate the patients? We all know the dentist will not have time to do this during their periodic exams. The only other dental team member qualified to educate the patients in these matters is the hygienist. I know many CDA's who are wonderful at their job but their background does not provide them with the proper education to assess these issues which must be addressed in an prophylaxis appointment. I feel that allowing DA II's to scale undermines the hygienist's value and authority and will ultimately confuse patients leading them to think they are not worth the hygienist's time.

Also, would the assistants be properly trained to assess periodontal status? For a normal recall patient would the DA II be trained to do a PSR or periodontal probing?  If a patient who normally is seen every 6 months presents for an appointment with a DA II and has 4mm localized pockets what would be done in that situation? Legally the DAII will not be able to scale those areas so would they tell the patient to come back to been seen by the hygienist? If a situation like that happened with the hygienist it would not be a problem but with the DA II it seems like it would be a waste of the patients and DA's time since they would not be allowed to scale in those areas.