Welcome to the first BDJ Team of 2021, where we are locked down once again and the timings of a return to carefree days sans COVID-19 are still uncertain.

This month we feature a dental professional who, along with her sister, a bespoke dressmaker, had a lightbulb moment during the first lockdown, and decided to start making sustainable PPE. Diane Stevens' and Kate Warner's company, Scrubs in Style, first came to my attention when they sent a press release to the BDJ. We are all so much more waste-conscious these days, and I hope the orders are soon rolling in for Diane and Kate at their farm workshop in Oxfordshire.

Our January cover star is Mariam Al-Ani, a dental therapist who is passionate about her child patients at a specialist referral service in Leeds. Mariam was so concerned for her patients during the turbulence of last year that she started to make videos on YouTube to help support their oral health. One of these can be viewed at: https://bit.ly/2Xt8bsY.

I am delighted that we include two original submissions in this issue, one entitled COVID-19 and dental nursing,and a chapter of Eleanor Forshaw's final year dissertation for her degree in dental hygiene and dental therapy, written in the style of a BDJ journal paper. I would like to encourage other undergraduate DCP students to submit their work to BDJ Team, particularly as I am planning a special issue focused on DCP research in the autumn.

I am bolstered once again this year by a plethora of new faces on our reader panel and all of their article ideas and suggestions. My response to a call for volunteers was so enthusiastic, I have accepted 13 new members (lucky for some), including DCTs, DCPs and a university tutor. The first six are introduced in this issue, and we will start publishing articles written by the panel members in February.

If your dental team is feeling a little overwhelmed by the ongoing doom and gloom of the pandemic and all it entails, do read Priya Sharma's article on team morale. Hopefully as the year goes on the situation will improve and we can all start to smile again... eventually without a mask.

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Kate Quinlan

Editor

k.quinlan@nature.com