CBE for Scotland’s Chief Dental Officer
Margie Taylor was awarded the prestigious accolade in the Queen’s New Year’s Honours and was keen to praise her colleagues and staff for all their work over the years
Scotland’s Chief Dental Officer (CDO), Margie Taylor, has paid tribute to her colleagues and staff after it was announced she was to receive a CBE in the Queen’s New Year’s Honours.
The CDO, who was appointed in 2007, said: “I feel enormously privileged to receive the CBE but recognise that many others have contributed to the improvement of oral health over the years and therefore have helped me gain this recognition.
“I would especially like to thank the team of nursery school nurses, primary school teachers and obviously the parents for recognising that tooth decay isn’t inevitable and have joined with the dental and public health nurses team, from many disciplines, to help reduce it.”
She explained that the achievement she is most proud of is the improvement in child dental health.
She said: “As a young dentist I spent a lot of time extracting baby teeth from very young children. When you know that dental decay is almost totally preventable I thought that it was an awful trauma for, not only the children, but the parents as well.
“So, when I was appointed as CDO I thought that if I can achieve anything in
the role it had to be to try and prevent
this disease.”
She also explained that she is encouraged by what the Scottish Government’s ‘A Stronger Scotland’ document says about dentistry.
She said: “This document has given us the way forward, which is to see if we can address the outdated system. The current system was devised when there was a lot of dental decay and a lot of people needed fillings and extractions and we have seen that pattern changing in recent years.”
Medics Against Violence co-founder Christine Goodall was also among those honoured in the Queen’s New Year’s Honours. She is to be awarded an OBE for services to violence prevention and victims of crime.
Other dental recognitions in the honours list includes MBEs for Jane Davies-Slowik, special care dentist from Birmingham and Eric Rooney, consultant in dental public health from Lancashire.
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