Meet Dr Greg Celine

Specialist paediatric dentist, Dr Greg Celine says he always wanted to do something in health care, but he didn’t set out with dentistry in mind. “I had started out in a Bachelor of Nursing, which I thoroughly enjoyed, but decided I go for something more practical. I applied for dentistry and never looked back.”

It was when he had a mentor who was excellent with kids that the seed was planted to consider paediatrics.

“I hadn’t really had much interest in treating kids until I started taking over my mentor’s books (he was heading towards retirement) and after a while I realised that those were the appointments I enjoyed the most.

“I previously hadn’t thought about specialising at all (in fact I gave some of my friends a hard time when they were doing the primaries the year after Dental School) but after a few years I realised that I think I wanted to limit my practice to paediatrics and decided to try and get into specialty training.”

Greg says as a specialist paediatric dentist, his favourite part of his job is working with children with complex medical conditions. “I’m lucky at the hospital in that I get to treat some of the most medically complex children in the state,” he says. “It means that every case is interesting and there’s no such thing as routine dentistry. I also enjoy that I get to work as part of a huge team. There aren’t many dentists who get to work in a practice that has hundreds of other professionals who all bring something to the table.”

For those practitioners who treat children their everyday practice, it is important to be familiar with the pathologies that they may see. For these practitioners, Greg will
be presenting a ‘Paediatric Soft Tissues - What’s normal and what’s not?’ dinner course in August at the University Club.

“My areas of interest are the management of medically compromised children and paediatric hospital dentistry,” Greg says. “I’m lucky enough to work at Perth Children’s Hospital full-time and we get to see quite a few acute and chronic presentations, including the common and also the rare, interesting and bizarre. The dinner course will go over a range of these and the approaches to their diagnosis and management.

“Attendees can expect a (hopefully interesting) run down of some of the basic principles around many soft tissue presentations. I like learning from cases so I’ll include as many cases as I can and hopefully provide people with the knowledge to be able to diagnose many soft tissues presentations and know how to manage and when and
where to refer.”

“I was a country dentist for my whole GDP career, and I believe strongly in keeping a broad scope,” he adds. “With that said, one of the nice things about being a specialist is seeing less common things with more frequency so if I can share some of that knowledge then that helps me to feel like I’m giving a little bit back to our community and to a profession that I’ve gained so much from.”

He recommends anyone who sees children regularly should attend. “As an ex-country dentist, I believe in practitioners maintaining a broad knowledge base, so I hope this will be useful for any dental practitioners who treat children,” he says.

Dr Greg Celine will be presenting ‘Paediatric Soft Tissues - What’s normal and what’s not?’ dinner course on August 15.
To book, visit adawa.com.au/product/paediatric-soft-tissues

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