The College and Foundation Nakao would like to congratulate the successful candidates in this year’s Foundation Nakao – CGDent Award in Coaching and Mentoring for Dental Care Professionals.
The winning entrants comprise five Dental Therapists, four Dental Nurses, two Clinical Dental Technicians, one Dental Hygienist and one Orthodontic Therapist from across the UK and elsewhere.
| Candidate name | Role | Membership | Region |
|---|---|---|---|
| Zahra Akhtar | Dental Therapist | Associate Member | Yorkshire and Northern |
| Humair Alam | Clinical Dental Technician | Associate Member | North Thames |
| Dena Andrews | Dental Therapist | Associate Member | Trent & East Anglia |
| Kenneth Binnah AssocFCGDent | Dental Nurse | Associate Fellow | Central London |
| Steven William Catterall | Dental Nurse | Associate Member | Mersey & North West |
| Poppy Louise Irvine | Dental Hygienist | Associate Member | Yorkshire and Northern |
| Sara Amina Jalloul | Orthodontic Therapist | Associate Member | Wessex & Oxford |
| Maria de los Llanos Martinez AssocFCGDent | Dental Therapist | Associate Fellow | Overseas |
| Caroline Persaud | Clinical Dental Technician | Associate Member | Wessex & Oxford |
| Carolyn Roberts | Dental Nurse | Associate Member | Wales |
| Michaela Christina Robinson | Dental Therapist | Associate Fellow | Wessex & Oxford |
| Georgina Smith | Dental Nurse | Associate Member | South Thames |
| Tyra Anne Watt | Dental Therapist | Associate Member | West & North Scotland |
The successful candidates have each been awarded a fully-funded place, worth £375, on a three-day training course in mentoring and coaching. Delivered online by UMD Professional – an organisation with more than thirty years’ experience of establishing coaching and mentoring practices within medical and legal organisations – the short course takes place over two days in November 2025 and one in January 2026, with eight weeks of assimilation and application and a 30-minute 1:1 supervision session in between.
Course content will include:
- What are coaching and mentoring?
- Skills, knowledge, attributes and behaviours required in coaching and mentoring
- A personal SWOT
- Contracting in coaching and mentoring
- Understanding boundaries
- Communication theories:
- Shannon and Weaver
- Transactional analysis
- Johari
- Assertiveness
- Objectivity v emotional response and unconscious bias
- Setting meaningful objectives and action planning
- Giving feedback
- The GROW model
- The OSCAR model
- Scaling
- Reflection
- Successes and challenges
- Cognitive distortion
- The role of emotional intelligence
- Supervision, group supervision and peer review
- Action learning using delegate examples
The award was made possible by the generous donation through Prof Avijit Banerjee FCGDent of sponsorship by Foundation Nakao. Also known as The Nakao Foundation for Worldwide Oral Health, it was founded by Makato Nakao, Chairman of GC Corporation, a leading manufacturer of dental materials and equipment. (GC also partners with the College on the CGDent-GC Award for Foundation Trainees.)
To enter the award, participants each submitted an application form stating how they would be able to apply their mentoring or coaching skills in practice during the assimilation and application period, and how they would apply the learning to support less experienced colleagues thereafter. The award was open to all Dental Care Professional members of the College.
Establishing a mentoring and coaching culture is key to the College’s commitment to workforce diversity, inclusion, and wellbeing. In promoting effective mentoring practice, we aim to foster appropriate support in the career pathway progression for all members of the oral healthcare team. Our aspiration is to cultivate a community of College members amongst Dental Care Professionals who are equipped and confident to nurture their peers.
It is anticipated that the Foundation Nakao – CGDent Award 2026 will open soon. To register your interest in the 2026 award and receive notifications as soon as applications open, email contact@cgdent.uk with the subject line “Foundation Nakao – CGDent Award 2026”.