I strongly opposed.  I am a dental hygienist with 31 years of experience and throughout my years I have had to TEACH many dentist whom I've worked with how to use scalers.  Dentist themselves have a short training period in dental school in scaling instrumentation compared to dental hygienist.  This is obvious after some dentist  perform prophylaxis on patients! Often I've had to scale again after patients have had cleanings by dentist. They  now want the assistants to treat patients after having very limited scaling training compared to the licensed hygienist .  The result will be substandard care for ill informed patients.

       By the way, there isn't a shortage of hygienist in Virginia just a maldistribution, and  some dentist who are interested in making more money unethically.