The College of General Dentistry (CGDent) and Foundation Nakao have sent their congratulations to 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 beyond:
| Zahra Akhtar | Dental Therapist | Yorkshire & Northern |
| Humair Alam | Clinical Dental Technician | North Thames |
| Dena Andrews | Dental Therapist | Trent & East Anglia |
| Kenneth Kojo Binnah AssocFCGDent | Dental Nurse | Central London |
| Steven William Catterall | Dental Nurse | Mersey & North West |
| Poppy Louise Irvine | Dental Hygienist | Yorkshire & Northern |
| Sara Amina Jalloul | Orthodontic Therapist | Wessex & Oxford |
| Maria de los Llanos Martinez AssocFCGDent | Dental Therapist | Overseas |
| Caroline Persaud | Clinical Dental Technician | Wessex & Oxford |
| Carolyn Roberts | Dental Nurse | Wales |
| Michaela Christina Robinson | Dental Therapist | Wessex & Oxford |
| Georgina Smith | Dental Nurse | South Thames |
| Tyra Anne Watt | Dental Therapist | 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 is generously sponsored by Foundation Nakao – also known as The Nakao Foundation for Worldwide Oral Health – which 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, it aims to foster appropriate support in the career pathway progression for all members of the oral healthcare team. The College’s aspiration is to cultivate a community of 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”.
