Eleven people, and no locums

Aoife opened Brightwater above a bakery on Marlowe Quay in 2009 with one chair, one nurse and a conviction that most people are frightened of the dentist because nobody has ever explained anything to them.

Seventeen years later there are two practices and eleven of us, and she still books forty minutes for a first examination. Her clinical work is now mostly implants and larger restorative cases — the sort of thing patients arrive believing is impossible.

She chairs the practice’s clinical governance meeting, mentors two associates through their MFDS, and is the person the rest of the team ring when a case gets complicated.

Niall does one thing and does it exceptionally well: he saves teeth other people have written off. He works entirely under a surgical operating microscope, which is why his success rate on retreatments — root canals that have already failed once elsewhere — sits well above the published average.

He came to Brightwater in 2016 after six years in a specialist referral practice in Manchester, and he still takes referrals from eleven other Dublin practices.

He is also, for what it is worth, the calmest person in the building. Patients who arrive convinced this will be the worst afternoon of their lives generally leave slightly puzzled about what the fuss was.

Sofia trained in Bologna and then at King’s College London, and joined us in 2018 to build the orthodontic side of the practice from nothing. She now runs aligner and fixed-appliance cases for around ninety patients at a time, roughly half of them adults.

She is straightforward about what orthodontics can and cannot do, and she will tell you if a case is better served by a specialist referral or by simply doing nothing. She digitally previews every case before you commit — you see the projected result and the projected number of months before you have paid anything.

Her Saturday clinic runs on the first Saturday of each month for patients who cannot take weekday time off.

James looks after most of the under-16s across both practices, and a good number of the adults who are just as nervous but less willing to say so.

His first appointment with a child under six involves no instruments at all. They sit in the chair, ride it up and down, count their own teeth in the mirror and go home with a sticker. The dentistry, if any is needed, happens on the second visit, by which point the room is no longer frightening.

He also holds the practice’s sedation certification, and runs the Wednesday list for adults who need oral or IV sedation to get through treatment.