Professional

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

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

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. 

Suppose you ask dental-phobic patients for the main reasons that the thought of dental visit elicits such fear and loathing.

In that case, most will probably respond with feelings related to the potential for anxiety or pain.

This anxiety can stem from genuine unpleasant past dental experiences or unknown potential for pain.

Fluoride continues to be our number one defence in the prevention and progression of dental caries. For those patients who adamantly refuse to use fluoride in any form, we must be knowledgeable in guiding them to alternative methods to increase their resistance to and prevention of caries. Prevention of dental caries involves many aspects. Primary prevention involves the etiology of ...