I'm Will Shield, a general dentist in Cairns. I qualified from James Cook University in 2017, so I'm nine years in and still figuring things out.
I started in private practice and it didn't go well. I moved into public dental and stayed six years. That gave me a solid foundation but a narrow scope, and coming back to private practice felt like starting over in a lot of areas. It's turned out to be the most useful thing for my clinical growth.
These days I'm an associate at Bupa Dental Cairns, five days a week. Most of it is bread-and-butter general dentistry: check-ups and cleans, fillings, crowns, root canals and dentures. The cases I enjoy most are precision-fit crowns and dentures.
The Fellowship
I'm working through the Fellowship in Restorative Dentistry (FRD) with RIPE Global. It's a two-year program of lectures, hands-on workshops and assessed cases, and it finishes with a full-mouth rehabilitation case. It's where most of my clinical growth is coming from right now. A lot of what I post is those cases, including the parts I'd do differently.
Teaching
I guest lecture final-year dental students at JCU. The talk I give them is the one I'd have wanted in fifth year. On 29 September I'm doing a RIPE Global webinar along the same lines, Things I Wish I Knew As a New Grad.
Building
End-of-day notes were keeping me at work, so I built ClinicalNote with Claude. I have no coding background. It's free, and it's the tool I use between patients. I'm interested in where AI actually saves a dentist time and where it's just hype, and I'd rather show you a tool than talk about it.
Outside work
Christian, husband, dad. Notes done and out the door by five. Keeping that boundary is a big part of why I built ClinicalNote.
Get in touch
Email me at will@drwillshield.com, or find me on Instagram at @drwillshield. I'm open to talks, mentoring new grads and collaboration.