Dental Hygienist in Tunbridge Wells

Attending regular hygienist appointments is extremely important in tackling and preventing gum disease and other destructive issues like tooth decay.

For the majority of patients, we recommend attending a hygienist appointment every six months.

As the saying goes, prevention is definitely better than a cure when it comes to dental hygiene. At Ibbott&Co, we aim to provide our patients with the knowledge and skills to be able to prevent tooth decay and gum disease. Our experienced team of dentists and hygiene therapists are here to help you keep your teeth and gums in fantastic condition.

Having good oral hygiene begins at home. Diligent brushing with an appropriate toothbrush (we love the Braun Oral B electric brushes), along with cleaning in between your teeth using interdental brushes or floss, will get you off to a great start. However, no matter how well you look after your teeth at home, the bacteria that leads to both tooth decay and gum disease can often find its way into places in the mouth that are impossible to reach without professional care.

A good oral health routine

• Brush your teeth for 2 minutes before you go to bed at night and on one other occasion every day – we recommend the morning.
• We see better gum health in patients using electric brushes than a manual and will always recommend these.
• Use toothpaste containing the correct amount of fluoride (and don’t rinse out—just spit!).
• Clean in between your teeth regularly – at least once a day.
• Avoid smoking.
• Regularly attending dental and hygienist appointments.

An appointment with our hygienist

For most new patients to Ibbott&Co dental clinic, we recommend an appointment for a Gum Health Assessment.

This initial appointment with our hygiene therapist team will be the foundation for the care of your teeth and gums for the years that lie ahead .

The content of this visit will depend to some extent on the dentist’s initial assessment of your gums at your Comprehensive Assessment.

We use the guidelines set out by the British Periodontal Society to help us determine the most appropriate care for your gum health.

The first part of the Gum Health Assessment will involve you and our hygiene therapist getting to know each other and the therapist finding out about how you look after your teeth and gums at the moment. She will want to take some further digital records for your mouth which we can use to track the progress of your gum health in the future.

She will then spend some time giving you some advice on the best ways to manage the care of your own mouth at home so that you are able to remove the soft plaque from around all of your tooth surfaces every day. This will involve demonstrating the use of the correct toothbrush (including how to hold it and where to angle it, not perhaps as obvious as you might think!) and which type of interdental cleaning aids to use to clean between your teeth. We are, of course, all very different shapes and have different levels of manual dexterity so it is extremely important that you are advised on the best type of cleaning aids for you. All of this means that we can help you to keep your teeth healthy and looking fantastic for the long term.

The last part of this appointment will entail the hygiene therapist removing any soft and hard plaque from around all of the surfaces of your teeth so that they feel amazing. She will then discuss with you when she thinks she needs to see you again and how frequently over the course of a year this should happen to maintain your gum health in the best possible way.

We are firm believers that gum health is the foundation of a healthy mouth, and we emphasize its importance in our clinic.