Welcome to Spring and the Spring issue of Vital.

As the days begin to show signs of lengthening and the daffodils and tulips help to encourage the rest of the garden to remember what to do in Spring, the team at Vital have been busy researching, interviewing and writing to keep you, the dental team, up to date with what's happening in the dental world and a few other things besides.

Oral Health Educators have their day in the sun on page 34 explaining all their good work and their enthusiasm is infectious so beware! It's a good avenue to investigate if you want to give your dental career an interesting development, as is becoming an dental nurse NVQ assessor, as Julie Ferry discovered in her article on page 24.

Antony Townsend also has big ideas for dental careers as he explained to Arveen Bajaj. How does starting as a dental nurse and finishing as a dentist sound? Turn to page 18 to find out more.

One of our roving reporter team found herself stretched out in the sun in Qatar over Christmas and stumbled across a British dental technician living the life of Riley. So she pinned him down to find out what he does. The results are a seductive lifestyle article on page 30. It is tempting to start packing right now.

Registration understandably continues to be a hot topic so Arveen Bajaj asked the GDC on your behalf about the latest with the Access to Registration Training developments. For details see page 15. One of the points of training is to find out what you don't know. Our quiz on page 27 might help you out a bit here. Have a go at the questions and find out what you don't know about your dental team colleagues' activities in their day to day jobs. It's a bit of fun and might introduce you to something or someone you didn't know before. Understanding other members of your team might help towards building up the team feeling which is always important, but never more important than after a tragedy. Arveen Bajaj interviewed two dental teams who had to keep things going after a tragedy, see page 20 to find out how they managed.

As ever your opinions are important to us and you have kept us informed of your thoughts in the letters and perspectives pages in this issue. Should the team be involved in the training of VDPs? Interesting... Find out what others thought on page 13. And don't forget to keep your opinions and letters coming in.