The 2024 Winner of the Esther Wilkins Lifetime Achievement Award Is Honored

Dimensions of Dental Hygiene, premier sponsor Colgate, and supporting sponsors Kettenbach and Pac-Dent, are pleased to announce Anna M. Pattison, RDH, MS, as the recipient of the 2024 Esther Wilkins Lifetime Achievement Award.

Pattison was honored with a special cocktail reception on the evening of September 13 in the California Ballroom of the Hilton Anaheim Hotel during the journal’s first ever live event Dimensions’ Discovery EXPO. Her former student and colleague Nancy Kiehl, RDH, MSEd — who currently provides periodontal instrumentation with the dental endoscope in Sandusky, Ohio — nominated Pattison and introduced her as the 2024 recipient.

With more than 50 years as a dedicated dental hygienist, educator, administrator, editor, author, and speaker, Pattison has made a monumental impact on clinical dental hygiene. Perhaps best known for co-authoring the seminal textbook Periodontal Instrumentation, she has shaped how periodontal instruments are held, fulcrumed, and activated during the removal of calculus. Pattison’s contributions to the highly specific skill of nonsurgical periodontal instrumentation have made it possible for dental hygienists to reach the base of deep periodontal pockets, thus providing greater success against periodontal diseases.

Pattison began her career in dental hygiene after receiving a Bachelor of Science in Dental Hygiene from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles in 1967 and, in 1968, she completed a Master of Science in Dental Hygiene Education and Administration from Columbia University in New York. Her master’s thesis became the book Periodontal Instrumentation – A Clinical Manual, the first of its kind providing dental hygiene students with step-by-step instructions for instrumentation, which she cowrote with her husband and periodontist Gordon Pattison, DDS.

Following a move to Boston in the mid-1970s, Pattison took positions as assistant professor in the Department of Periodontology at the Tufts University School of Dental Medicine and clinical instructor at the Forsyth School for Dental Hygienists. It was at Tufts that Pattison shared an office and taught with Esther M. Wilkins, BS, RDH, DMD, beginning a lifelong, close friendship.

For years, she and Dr. Wilkins presented lectures together in cities all over the US. Currently, she and her husband are co-directors of the Pattison Institute, which offers periodontal instrumentation courses both in person and online. In 2002, Pattison became the first editor in chief of Dimensions of Dental Hygiene, guiding its mission of providing high-quality, peer-reviewed education to dental hygienists. Pattison’s impact on the profession is indelible and she remains one of the world’s leading experts in the field of periodontal instrumentation.

Named after its inaugural recipient, the late dental hygiene leader Esther M. Wilkins, BS, RDH, DMD, the Esther Wilkins Lifetime Achievement Award is presented each year to recognize the distinguished career of an individual who has consistently contributed to the enrichment of the dental hygiene profession.

From Dimensions of Dental Hygiene. October/November 2024; 22(6):8.