Willis Street

The school dental service was established in the early 1920s to address dental decay in New Zealand children. Dentists complained of dealing with fractious school children after school who had advanced dental disease. Instead, it was intended that dental nurses would treat the children during school hours ‘when they were under a certain amount of discipline’.

The dental nurses would receive two years of training to treat an infant’s ‘deciduous’ teeth up to the age of six and use preventative methods. Dental nurses were to be thought of as ‘auxiliaries’ rather than half=trained dentists. While some dentists may have felt threated by this new role, marriage would prevent dental nurses from setting up their own practices. This was because women in New Zealand’s Public Service had to stop working once they married. The service expanded under the Labour government from 1935 with children up to the age of 10 receiving treatment. Three training schools established to increase the number of dental nurses.

The foundation stone for the Dominion Training School was laid by the Prime Minister (the Rt. Hon. M. J. Savage) in May 1938 on the site of the old Te Aro School in Willis Street. The building was to provide a modern clinic for the treatment of children’s teeth and serve as a training school for up to 50 dental nurses each year. The trained nurses would then be sent to the 300 school dental clinics around New Zealand.

The four-storey building was constructed of reinforced concrete, the design by Government Architect J.T. Mair. The cement was coloured green and the steel window frames painted cream. The ground floor contained the administration offices, the main waiting rooms and an assembly hall for nurses and staff. On the first floor were an operating room, a lecture room for 50, a demonstration room, lounge, dining room and kitchen. But the most spectacular room was on the second floor – a clinic for 50 dental units extending along the whole frontage to Willis Street. The construction contract was rumoured to be £80,000.

Children were catered for with miniature furniture in the waiting room and a low-set second hand rail on the stairs. An ‘elaborate and efficient’ system of chair indicators and loudspeakers to let a child know when their assigned dental chair was free and waiting for them was used.

The building was opened by the wife of the Governor General, Viscountess Galway on 14th May 1940 and operated until 1999. It has since been converted into apartments. Fifteen other countries set up similar school dental service schemes to that established in New Zealand.

References

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5534465/

https://nzhistory.govt.nz/page/first-trainee-school-dental-nurses-appointed