Your safety and Coronavirus
At Keyworth Dental Practice we know that you are enthusiastic about keeping your teeth and mouth healthy but we also know that you may be worried about your safety due to Cononavirus at this time.
I thought that I would explain a few of the things that we have put in place to ensure your safety. These improve the safety for all our patients and staff. Together we will get through this crisis.
Before every appointment you will receive a detailed screening phone call. This is to make sure we have meticulous, up to date information about your health status. It will mean that we exclude anyone with COVID symptoms from the practice. If you are “shielding” we will offer you the first appointment in the morning so we can ensure that you will not meet any other patients and that the air in the practice is completely clear.
All the surfaces that you might touch are disinfected after you enter the practice and again after you leave. This means everything is clean whenever you attend the practice. We ask you not to touch surfaces unless essential but rest assured they will be hygienic.
You will notice that we are all wearing more PPE than usual and we are wearing this before you get here, again this is for your protection. We will take your temperature as you enter the building and ask you to use the hand sanitiser before you enter the building. You will not usually see another patient when you are here, we are spacing appointments to avoid this, on the few occasions when there is another patient in the practice we may ask you to wait in your car or outside for a few minutes until we have cleaned and disinfected everything.
Please read the sign on the “A” board before entering the building.
We are taking payments in advance, again to reduce the time you are in the practice and reduce physical contact between yourself and our team. Appointments, estimates and receipts will be sent by email.
You will normally be shown straight through to the surgery and we ask you to bring as few personal items with you as possible. You can use the door handle to open and close the surgery door, it has been disinfected since it was last touched. Your treatment will be completed in as few appointments as possible to minimise the number of appointments you need. After your treatment please move through to reception and stand on the blue circle marked on the floor until we arrange any further appointments or paperwork for you.
We follow current legislation and guidelines for cross infection control, and the practice is regularly inspected by external auditors to ensure that we comply with all current health and safety laws, and follow regulations and recommendations for good clinical practice, to ensure that we provide a high quality of care, and a sustainable standard in all aspects of dental care.
Equipment
We will provide you with protective glasses and a disposable protective covering. We use disposable items where possible, and we sterilise all our re-usable equipment after each use, using an autoclave (steam and heat at 135 degrees C). We use a range of quick acting and effective disinfectants, we use sterilox system – an innovative new process which generates free chlorine, Ozone and Hypochlorous Acid to produce the most effective and the only biodegradable disinfectant available, to prevent the build up of biofilm in our equipment. We go to exceptional lengths to ensure there will be no transmission of infection at our practice.
Surfaces
Surgery surfaces are disinfected between patients and all our staff are trained in effective cross infection control measures. We will wear face masks, anti-splatter shields and a new pair of disposable gloves for each patient. We are immunised to prevent the spread of hepatitis B, pertussis, polio, diphtherial, tuberculosis, tetanus and rubella.
Staff Training
Every 12 months all our team members complete a rigorous First Aid and Resuscitation training programme, and we are familiar with the use of a wide selection of emergency drugs.
X-rays
Many patients are concerned about their exposure to x-rays at the dentist, and we too share this concern which is why we limit the number of x-rays we take to a minimum and only to obtain essential information.
We use the latest x-ray equipment which is checked monthly and certified every 15 months to ensure that it complies with current legislation. This means that the lowest possible x-ray dose is used every time we take a film.
- We use narrow beam (only 6 cm wide) so only the area we are interested in is exposed.
- The x-ray beam is filtered so that all the ‘soft’ harmful radiation is removed, since we only need the ‘hard’ relatively harmless radiation for x-rays of teeth.
- The x-ray “dose” from one small film is about the same as you get from 6 hours background radiation (the natural radiation you experience all day, every day, wherever you are).
Why we need to take x-rays
We may sometimes want to take one or more x-rays of your mouth. This is to give us important extra information, for example to spot decay underneath old crowns or fillings or to assist with completing a successful root filling.
How often do we take x-rays?
How often we will want to take x-rays will depend on a variety of factors. Usually we would need them at your first visit to the practice or if you have not been for a long time. After that we assess whether you have a low, medium or high risk of dental decay and take some x-rays to monitor progress about every 6 months to 3 years. We will always need x-rays to enable us to carry out root fillings or the removal of wisdom teeth, and we also need a recent x-ray before preparing a tooth for a crown or bridge.
