I hope you are enjoying your summer vacation! I am just back from taking some time off and now gearing up for our courses and programs for the fall.

I know many of you have participated in our programs, both the free and purchased ones. We are grateful to have you here with us and for supporting us.

I wanted to address something that I see on the Facebook groups and this will not pertain to all who are reading this email, so please bear with me.

There are RDH's who publicly declare "I will never pay for a CE course". "I look for free ones only!" "Why should I pay for something that is sponsored?"

So, I wanted to share first why rdhu was created. Why we created this community.

rdh - as you know, stands for Registered Dental Hygienist

u - has multiple meanings. u - as in, it is all about YOU. How can we help you, the dental hygienist grow not only professionally but personally as well? How can we help make dental hygienists be more engaged and love what they do? How can we help remind dental hygienists that what they do is so important? How can we elevate the profession? How can we elevate you, as a dental hygienist? How can we deliver content that is engaging and provide takeaways to implement into their practice? How can we de-mystify the QA requirements and provide multiple resources so that we are the easy button for the dental hygienist?

u - as in continued education (have you seen iTunes U or MacDonalds U?) Also, it is not a Capital because we are not a University.

For years, I would go to seminars, most times it was in a room full of 100 - 200 other dental hygienists. As you know, I am from Ontario, so always had the dreaded and mysterious portfolio (at the time), on the forefront of my mind. I would leave the course feeling dissatisfied, like it was a waste of my time. I found the presenters and organizers not so engaging (for the most part) and most times I did not leave with any takeaways. I still feared the portfolio. I didn't know what was expected of me with regards to completing a successful submission.

Prior to the portfolio we collected CE points. This is way back and I remember showing up to courses with the team and half of the team would skip out once they collected points.

Do these past experiences sound familiar to you?

I knew I wanted to do something different. At the time I owned a dental instrument company where we had our own line of dental hygiene instruments. It was a great Canadian company that offered new instruments, maintenance (re-tipping and sharpening) programs, and hands-on courses. We had customers across North America (I sold the company 8 years ago). I had many dental hygienists share how much they really enjoyed the hands-on courses I provided in offices and at conferences. They enjoyed the hands-on learning and were able to implement the new knowledge and skill into practice right away and asked if I could do more. Could I offer more hands-on and engaging courses? At this time, I also had many dental hygienist talk to me about the portfolio and share how much anxiety it created.

This is when I set out to start a professional development company as I always look for a need or a void and try to fill it. I wanted to create a one-stop shop by providing courses that were engaging, highlight the new learning, and look for and share implementation strategies. For those who needed extra activities and a goal statement, we provided this info to help complete a goal. We bring the learning to life so that it isn't just mundane information that you would simply check off in a box, done! We also created an online Portfolio Manager and had 5000 dental hygienists maintain their portfolio through our system. We de-mystified the portfolio process.

rdhu created a change in the way professional development is delivered. We now see a lot of the things we started being shared with other presenters, other Professional Development companies and associations. Our concepts and our verbiage. For this I am so grateful that we are pioneers in this development. It didn't happen over night and it took a team to make this happen.

I am passionate about both professional and personal development. I didn't start a company that was about me. I am not the main presenter. We seek the best of the best. No one speaker should present on all topics as each specializes and does extensive research on the topic being presented.

I also believe in investing in personal and professional development. My husband and I take many courses and programs together. I especially love the ones where we can attend live, in person. Investing in these programs made me who I am today and I look forward to evolving every year.

Professional Development is expensive to deliver. Which is why we seek sponsorship to help off-set the cost for our registrants. We try our best to offer free CE when we can and charge a reasonable rate every other time to help you.

Many companies are offering free CE as it brings awareness to their company and essentially their products. Most of their CE will be short 1 -2 hours which is great to help layer and deepen your learning for a particular topic.

There are many behind-the-scenes resources that need to be in place to deliver Professional Development.

We, as a team, are passionate about delivering such great content and a world class Professional Development experience, like no other.

To our presenters who spend hours and hours on putting together presentations (and constantly updating!) and all the evidence-based research you do, thank you.

To our team who work so hard to deliver the rdhu experience, thank you.

To our sponsors and corporate partners who work tirelessly as a company to be innovative so that we can provide excellence to our patients, thank you,

And to you, our members, who share such nice emails of how much you appreciate the work we do, thank you,

I am super excited for the next few months of both Professional and Personal Development that we have in store for you! Let's finish the last few months of 2021 strong!

See you in September! Be sure to register ASAP as many of our programs have limited spaces available.

Please note, if you have any comments or suggestions, please email me personally at kathleen@rdhu.ca

Thank you for reading and have a great week ahead. Please take a look below for what is coming up!

Kindest regards,

Kathleen