Dental hygienists and interprofessional collaboration: thoughts from 1927

In 1927, Ethel Covington, the first dental hygiene author of a paper in the Journal of the American Dental Hygienists' Association (now the Journal of Dental Hygiene), wrote about the risk of specialization and how dental hygienists need to know more about other professions.2 Below are excerpts from that article: "As an auxiliary branch of dentistry, having limited field of service, we may be compared to any specialized group with the same grave danger of knowing too little about the things to which our work is related. Many schools of dental hygiene are located on health sciences campuses that also educate nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists, pharmacists and other professional groups who should know about the importance of oral hygiene and its relationship to general health.