UK Graduate’s Globetrotting Portfolio Career
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- Published: Thursday, 03 October 2024 09:45
- Written by Peter Ingle
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GDPUK aims to celebrate the full range of dental general practice and the anything but mundane lives of many ‘typical‘ dentists. From Liverpool to London to New Zealand, with stops in Thailand, India, and a selection of disaster scenes, dentist Vivienne Levy, has had a particularly eventful journey through her dental career. Patients at her suburban practices may not have known that she has been involved in rather more than ‘routine‘ dentistry.
She was born in Liverpool and was originally interested in studying medicine, but her headmaster told her she was too “lazy” to get into medical school. So she found herself at the London Hospital Medical College, studying dentistry.
This was followed up by a diploma in forensic odontology, partly inspired by a talk by the well known and pioneering forensic odontologist Bernie Sims, and partly thanks to an American TV drama series. Speaking to South Island newspaper The Press, Vivienne explained: “I used to watch the show Quincy on TV and he was a pathologist that solved crimes as well, which was quite amazing. I don’t think that actually exists, a pathologist that solves murders, but at the time I thought that was really interesting.” While Levy has never solved a murder, forensic work would become a major part of her career.
Another turning point would be when she, “met a Kiwi in London, travelled, and then came to New Zealand.” Since moving there in 1989 she has been involved in more than 100 cases in Christchurch for the police and the coroner, as well as further afield.
She was part of the New Zealand team that travelled to Phuket to identify victims of the 2004 tsunami which claimed thousands of lives. In the following years she would assist with victim identification after a mining disaster, and after the Christchurch earthquake. In 2019, she was called in to help identify victims killed in the March 15 mosque terror attack.
Being so close to the frontline during major tragedies was not easy. “The tsunami was hard, just the scale of it,” says Levy. She was in Thailand for a month, working in extreme heat in an environment that wasn’t exactly set up for forensic odontology. The resilience of the Thai people and how they dealt with the disaster was “amazing”.
Levy said that the scale of death in Thailand after the tsunami, coupled with working in a disaster zone was unlike anything she had seen before. Her job was to identify victims by comparing them to dental records. Many were tourists so dental records had to come from overseas, others were from small villages or illegal immigrants who didn’t have dental records. “I think that is the first time I experienced trauma afterwards. But I’m resilient. It is hard and then I move on and get over it.”
The New Zealand Dental Association recently presented Levy with the 2024 NZDA Service Award, which chief executive Mo Amso says is testament to her “widespread accomplishments”, years of service to the association, and her “goodwill and philanthropic spirit.”
Apart from forensic work, Levy has had thousands of patients in her own dental chairs over the years. She set up Halswell Dental Centre in 1991, and a second practice in 2014.
When asked if her “normal” dental work felt boring compared to the historic events she has been part of, she replied, “No, I make it interesting.”
And whenever the day-to-day threatened to become mundane, Levy packed a bag and flew across the world to volunteer in places where her skills were desperately needed. She has worked as a dentist in Tibetan refugee camps in North India, doing “proper field dentistry” in places that sometimes didn’t have running water. Later she returned to India to do more volunteer work at a dental clinic in Ladakh.
Closer to home she continues to do volunteer work at the Canterbury Charity Hospital where she has been working regular sessions since 2013.
Reflecting on how her career has taken its course she concluded, “I just say yes even if I have to figure out how to do it later.”
Image by Kai Schwoerer from The Press, NZ
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