Fiona is all smiles as business venture keeps things in the family

East Renfrewshire woman Fiona Lee has become the third generation of her family to run a dental surgery.

Their link with dentistry dates back to the 1940s, when Stuart Lee opened his first practice in Church Street, Johnstone.

Little did he know then that his interest in all things pearly white would later be embraced by his son James, who kept up the family tradition by opening the Bridge Street Dental Surgery, in Linwood, 40 years later.

Now it is James’ daughter Fiona who has taken over the surgery, which she has rebranded as Smile Dental Care Linwood.

“I was always really close to my dad and I remember wanting to be like him,” she told the Barrhead News. “We ended up working together in the Bridge Street practice, which was great.

“I’ve met siblings who have both gone into dentistry but never three generations of the same family.”

Fiona, who started working with her dad in 2006, has now been handed the keys to the Linwood surgery a decade after he died.

The 37-year-old Newton Mearns woman has wasted little time in leaving her own mark by giving the business a new name but she insists patients can expect to get the same high level of care they have become accustomed to.

Some patients at the surgery have been treated there for nearly four decades.

Fiona said: “There is so much work to do at a busy surgery and, at one point, we did consider giving up but there’s too much family history there for us to abandon it.

“There are people who have been going to the practice for years. Just the other week I was with a patient who first started coming here in the 1980s.

“There was too much to walk away from.”

Despite the love of dentistry that adorns so many branches of her family tree, mum-of-two Fiona isn’t convinced it will be the career of choice for the clan’s next generation.

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