Not all tears are bad.
After 16 or 17 or something like that years, Karen Walker retired last Thursday, with the celebration in the practice on Friday.
Karen was ‘just a hygienist’, but there is no such thing, and there is definitely no such thing in relation to Karen Walker.
I first met Karen well over 20 years ago when she was referred to me by her then-husband, after someone had thrown a bottle in her face and she'd lost an upper canine.
I placed an implant to restore it, and it's still there and looks great (amazingly so).
(and Karen won't mind me telling that story because we've told it in teaching often enough).
Some years later, we met again, but we had known of each other and knew of each other, and I had just taken over a practice and was desperate for a hygienist.
Karen stepped over the chasm, came to work with us after what had been a hugely successful career working for Optical Express and Boots, and other private practitioners.
Together, we built a vision of what ideal hygiene and practise would look like in terms of implant dentistry, and then we built a system for recalls and an insistence that patients had to see a hygienist before their treatment (no one else would do this because they were worried the cost would put people off).
We built a guarantee system around 5 and 10-year guarantees and compulsory recalls to maintain your guarantee, and then we measured everything.
We adopted and developed protocols for the treatment of peri-implant disease that have been widely taught. We have published, taught, disrupted, educated, annoyed, aggravated, and generally made a nuisance of ourselves together in the world of explaining to people that implant dentistry is ‘not fit and forget’. There's a responsibility on the patient to look after what is done.
We invented ‘if you look after it, we'll look after it’.
The development of the guarantee system in The Campbell Clinic was perhaps one of the most successful things we have ever done, one of the greatest drivers of trust for patients and referring dentists, and Karen was essential and integral to that; it would not have happened without Karen Walker.
Karen became a speaker of the ITI (the first hygienist to ever do so). She became a board member of the ADI (the first hygienist to ever do so). She hosted congresses, she lectured widely, she educated enormously.
What Karen actually did in her career, and definitely in the last 15 years, was she repeatedly dropped pebbles in ponds that created waves that became tsunamis.
Karen's irreplaceable in dentistry, but she's on to other things, bigger and better, a new life journey for Karen, and although we cried (and we did), not all tears are bad.
KazHyg, it's not goodbye, it’s see you later.
Blog Post Number - 4505
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