Michelle Aubé (Simmonds), RDH
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April 10, 2023
Spring signifies a time of change where colors are plentiful, and every breath delivers fresh air. Dental professionals should use the energy of seasonal change for their own refueling and restructuring.
It goes without saying, dental offices are busy places and the day-to-day operations do not leave much time in anyone’s schedule to re-organize physical spaces in the office as well as the mental compartments of our process of care circuits when treating clients.
What does physical space re-organizing look like? This would be going around the office and removing ALL clutter. The best way to ‘SEE’ if your office and operatories look cluttered is to take a picture. Play an ‘eye-spy’ game with the picture. What do you see that should not be in the picture?
An Untidy Work Area Equates Uncleanliness
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April 07, 2023
Risk Management in a Dental Office
In many provinces, the pivotal moment for IPAC was before the pandemic, in 2017, when public health units and regulatory bodies took a closer look at the practice of IPAC in dentistry to ensure compliance with ‘routine practice’. Before the pandemic, many offices had already swept through their IPAC policies and made enhancements to strengthen their IPAC procedures, decreasing the risk level and satisfying the elements of routine practice. Although in 2017 reading the fine print and deciphering through the grey areas of written standards seemed like a pain in the neck, I look back and say thank you, 2017, for shaking our IPAC world ahead of time.
In this shake-up, dental professionals became more knowledgeable in the theory of IPAC and started initiating structure to IPAC. Again, not that we did not follow IPAC prior, but we did
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March 10, 2023
In the past few months, I have been asked by dental offices what type of training the person performing instrument reprocessing requires.
Regardless of geographical location, every dental office MUST have a policy in effect that specifies the requirements and frequencies of baseline and ongoing IPAC education and training, as well as a competency assessment of the employee in regard to instrument reprocessing and the equipment used for reprocessing.
What does this mean for new hires and existing employees?
First, it means when new hires come on board, having an existing team member, or the team member that is about to leave train the new hire no longer cuts it. Why?
Because it’s not enough.
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March 05, 2023Quiet quitting is about setting healthy barriers to well-defined job descriptions with supportive leadership from management. A ‘good leader’ that takes care of their team has already put quiet quitting elements into practice way before it was called quiet quitting. A ‘good leader’ offers strategies for their team to have a work-life because they want ...
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March 05, 2023A dental office reprocessing area must be organized in a one-way workflow to prevent cross-contamination. The one-way workflow is composed of stations that are linked in functionality to one another to finally achieve the end point of reprocessing; sterilization. Each station can only perform the duties of THAT station and can only host the contents of THAT station’s tasks. In ‘common practice’ vs ‘best practice’ reprocessing rooms ...
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March 05, 2023Our previous blog post discussed the Canadian dental labour shortage and identified some rationales as to why there is a labour shortage in dentistry. In the first post, we identified that Dentistry requires a high level of performance expectations from those working in the industry.
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March 01, 2023There are two main elements to the reprocessing of a dental bur. First, what does the manufacturer of the bur state to do with the bur? Is it single use or can it be reprocessed? Second, if it can be reprocessed what are the steps from end-to-end use that meet IPAC standards of practice.
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February 24, 2023
For years, dentistry has had an oversaturation of dental professionals. There hasn’t been a dental labour shortage before now. Instead, job postings were few and far between and most jobs surfaced through word of mouth and were immediately filled. Currently, Canada is experiencing a significant labour shortage in dentistry. Dental professionals, where are you?
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September 14, 2022In any IPAC discussion, a proper risk assessment guided by the Hierarchy of Controls and Spaulding’s Classification will never stir any IPAC guru wrong! Even with dental offices having attended countless continuing education on IPAC, there may still be lingering remnants of ‘common practice’ that require a closer look.
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August 12, 2022Although digital imaging is at the forefront of dentistry, not every office has a digital scanner or a second or third scanner to fully eliminate manual impression taking. In every office there seems to always be the one or two impression guru’s that constantly capture a fabulous impression. You too can be an impression guru with the review of some simple elements and skills that can deliver a more predictable ‘good impression’ organized with proper planning.
