An apology, a plea for forgiveness, and a deal I hope you can't refuse

By Kevin Henry, Editor, Dental Assisting Digest™

I start this Editor’s Note with an apology, a plea for forgiveness, and a deal I hope you can’t refuse. Interested?

For the last two months, I have told you that the September issue of Dental Assisting Digest™ would contain the final results of our 2010 dental assistant salary survey. This is one of our most popular articles of the year, where DAD readers provide us with all of the salary information. In the past, our responses have been enormous (and I thank you all for that), but this year was a different animal. Call it the economy, bad timing, a fear of clicking a link, or whatever you will, but when the deadline for responses came, I really didn’t feel like we had enough to make the story a true representation of your salaries and beliefs. With that in mind, I am keeping the salary survey open until Friday, Oct. 15, in order to get the most responses possible before I write the story for the October edition of Dental Assisting Digest™. Yes, I promise, cross-my-heart, pinkie swear that the article will be in October ... and it will be worth the wait. Trust me.

With that being said, if you haven’t already done so, please click here to take the six-question salary survey that will take less than three minutes of your time. Please? I would really appreciate the help, and I know the more dental assistants who fill out our survey, the better the information will be for all of you. Thank you in advance for helping, and a heartfelt thanks to the American Dental Assistants Association for sending along a link to the survey in a recent e-mail blast.

So ... since I couldn’t run the salary survey in this issue, I decided to try to help you out by providing links to the most recent numbers we have for dentist and hygienist salaries (as well as the early results of the 2010 DAD salary survey). I think you’ll find the links useful and informative. Consider it my olive branch to you, and I hope you’ll accept it. Click here to find those links to dentist and hygienist salaries.

Two weeks from today, I’ll be in Orlando at the ADA Annual Session as it nears its conclusion. If you’re going to the land of Mickey and Minnie for the meeting, I hope to run into you. If you see me in the exhibit hall aisles or at the ADAA gathering, please stop me and say hello. I’d love to meet you and hear what’s on your mind.

Read on, this is your e-newsletter ...