It's not a secret anymore!

For many years the standing remarks about ADAA was that we were the "best kept secret in dentistry." Despite the fact that our membership is in the thousands (about 15,000 right now) and most of our members had achieved the Certified or Registered status of a true professional, nobody seemed to know our name.

How nice that all of that is changing!

One of our most recent achievements has been the development of a recognition program for the dental assistants working with members of the American College of Prosthodontists. We are very pleased to be providing this educational/professional service to them in a program very recently begun. Also new this year will be the joint education programs at our annual conference this year that will be offered with the American Association of Women Dentists. And what about the conference itself? Well, this year is our ninth year of meeting jointly with the Academy of General Dentistry too.

During the past year we were delighted to conduct roundtables at the Greater New York Dental Meeting, the Yankee Dental Meeting, Hinman Dental Meeting (in Atlanta), the Chicago Midwinter Meeting and the California Dental Meeting. These huge shows proved enormously successful for both our educational roundtables and for recruitment purposes in the exhibit area. One of the reasons for this success was our partnering with Linda L. Miles, renowned dental practice consultant who has made us a part of her world through providing a membership application in every copy of her recent best selling textbook Dynamic Dentistry and generously providing us with a contribution from the sale of each book.

We continue to provide education through courses and journals to both military and civilian dental assistants in the U.S. Army and we have created a trustee position for the Army on our national board. We have provided consultative services to the American Dental Association in its development of basic training materials for dental assistants being trained on-the-job and we continue as equal participants with them in Dental Assistants Recognition Week each year along with the Canadian Dental Assistants Association and the Canadian Dental Association.

Our courses are on-line with ProBusiness (formerly dentalxchange) and with Procter & Gamble and our own web site links with dentalworkers.com so our members can enjoy special ADAA benefits as they post their resumes and build their dental assisting careers. And to add to that we have a regular place in Dental Equipment & Materials magazine every issue. If anyone hasn't heard of us, I'm afraid they just aren't listening because our message is out there loud and clear. We're the ADAA. We're the people who make dental assisting a profession and we urge you to stay with us as we grow.

Thank you. I've had a wonderful year!