Anyone who has visited a dental office can appreciate the need to manage pain for certain procedures. Since 1971, dental hygienists in some states were allowed to administer local anesthesia (LA) to aid in pain control of dental procedures including scaling and root planing. Over the years many states followed suit and changed their practice acts to include this important procedure. In 2012 Florida became the 44^th state to allow dental hygienists to expand their scope of practice and administer intraoral block anesthesia and or soft tissue infiltration anesthesia to their dental hygiene patients.

St. Petersburg College’s Dental Hygiene Program prepared for implementing this in the ASDH (Associate in Science in Dental Hygiene) curriculum by first training their faculty in the spring of 2013. New graduates of the ASDH program are now automatically certified in LA, but Registered Dental Hygienists (RDH) in the community also needed the opportunity to be trained and be certified in order to add this advanced  skill and be a practice builder.

ASDH Program Director Joan Tonner and her faculty came to the rescue!  Administration of Local Anesthesia for the Dental Hygienist is a continuing education course designed for dental hygienists in the community who want to gain this new skill. The course consists of 30 hours of self-paced online instruction with assessments that can be taken at home. After completing the online component, there are four days of labs that give the participants 30 hours of hands-on clinical experience with the multiple injection techniques.

What is unique about the SPC model for this LA certification course is that instead of “observation hours,” participants practice “hands on” the administration of local anesthesia on fellow peer patient subjects in a highly supportive interactive lab environment. More than 150 dental hygienists in the community have completed this certification course and now have the professional designation of RDH-C.

It is documented that allowing the RDH-C to administer LA is beneficial for both dental patients and the clinician. Many dental hygienists and dentists report that this expanded function has a positive impact on scheduling, production, patient satisfaction and comfort and quality of dental care. May 2015 will mark the 50^th year that SPC has graduated a newly minted class of dental hygienists—a lot has changed in our profession since 1965, not the least of which is the addition of the administration of local anesthesia!