06 • Profile
THE WILD I
CALL OF
Intrepid dentist Penelope Granger has practised everywhere from the extremes of Antarctica to the world’s remotest island in the south Atlantic
F you were asked to describe a normal dentist’s everyday job, it would be unlikely to involve braving temperatures of -20C or close encounters with wild crocodiles. Yet these are exactly the kind of challenges Penelope Granger has faced throughout much of her career. ‘Home’ for Penelope and her three-year-old
daughter Elika is an even split between Edinburgh, Scotland and Östrand, Sweden, but her work as a dentist has taken her from the top of the globe to the bottom, and everywhere in between. Penelope’s thirst for adventure began aged 18 on her first trip abroad as an au pair in Israel before she studied dentistry at Dundee University.
Career plan “One of the things that attracted me to dentistry was the fact that you could travel with it,” she says. “It’s always been my plan to take my career around the world.” After graduating in 1991, Penelope
completed her VDP year as an associate in an Aberdeen city centre practice. But it wasn’t long before she gave in to her itchy feet. “I did a mixture of travel and work and that was when I first started to pick up on ‘interesting’ places to work - mostly by accident.” Her first overseas post was in Aboriginal
settlements in the Australian outback, secured after she wrote a letter addressed simply to: “The
Dentist, Thursday Island, Queensland.” She explains: “There was no formal application process. I think they found my interest amusing and so gave me a chance. “They would fly me in on a Monday with all the kit and leave me in one of the settlements in what felt like the middle of nowhere. I would treat patients in a fixed dental clinic based in a medical centre which often doubled as my accommodation. It was usually routine consultations, fillings and extractions but there was at least one occasion where I lost my bed for the night to an emergency admission. “I’d usually be picked up again on the Friday but
there was one weekend stay that involved fishing for baramundi near the Gulf of Carpentaria and some rather close encounters with impressively large saltwater crocodiles. It was exciting and gave me a taste for practising dentistry in a different way.”
Doing things differently So, how do ‘in the field’ dentistry and ‘practice- based’ dentistry compare? “It’s the challenge of arriving somewhere and all the skills you’ve learned, you carry with you. You have to be self-reliant and confident in your clinical skills and decision-making,” Penelope says. “After a while, dentistry can become about
perfecting your technique. There are rarely any huge leaps forward. For me, the challenge is ensuring I provide high quality treatment and care wherever I go.
“When I came to work in Sweden, for
instance, I was worried at first about being able to keep up with the quality that everyone else maintains here. Then I remember feeling pleasantly surprised by the consistency of my work and I was fine. Working in different
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