ONLY WOMAN WITH DENTAL PRACTICE

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32035, 9 July 1969, Page 2

ONLY WOMAN WITH DENTAL PRACTICE

Mrs Patricia M. Hogan is the only woman dentist in the South Island with a full-time private practice. She is undeterred by the fact that other women in the profession prefer to work with the Health Department or in hospital posts.

Any prejudices and difficulties she has faced had been worth it, she said yesterday.

“Many members of the public expect more sympathy from a woman—and they get it, if it is genuinely deserved. Whether male or female, a good dentist needs some degree of compassion and a sense of responsibility towards the patients,” she said. From a professional family background, Mrs Hogan took it for granted she would go to university. She chose dentistry in preference to medicine, and graduated from the University of Otago in 1949.

“I was on the staff of the Christchurch Public Hospital for six months and an associate in a private practice in

Auckland for six months, before romance got the upper hand," she said. SCHOOL WORK She returned to Christchurch to marry and worked for the Health Department here for 15 years, the last six of them as senior dental officer lecturing at the training school for dental nurses. After completing a postgraduate course in Sydney, Mrs Hogan went into private

practice four years ago, when her husband died. Dentistry was regarded as a “women's profession” in Scandinavian countries, but the school dental service claimed many New Zealand girls capable of becoming good dentists, she said. Attractions to dental nursing were the shorter training, pay from the beginning, and longer holidays.

When Mrs Hogan graduated, she was one of four girls who completed the dentistry course that year. Two of the others married and the third is on the staff of an Australian university.

Mrs Hogan strongly believes that girls with professional training should use it and that marriage and children need not be a bar to this.

“It is quite possible to do post-graduate courses,” she said.