Is it Safe to visit Dental Clinics during COVID-19?

The Coronavirus is changing the way we access health care, and dental care is no exception.

Dr Anupama Jaswal, a general dentist working at NOA dental clinic, Dubai, explains how Covid-19 is changing a dental clinic's day-to-day operations to ensure maximum safety of the patients.

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Dr. Anupama Jaswal

Dentist
NOA Dental Clinic

What are the precautionary measures taken by your clinic to ensure patient safety during COVID-19?

We have started doing telephone triage. That means we call the patient before the patient is booked in for an appointment. We check the patient, if it’s a genuine emergency or if it can be sorted out over the phone itself.

If we need to call the patient in, all personal protective equipment has been put in place both for the patient as well as for the staff.

We have reduced the capacity to 30%. That means even the staff is working at 30% and the number of patients that we are going to accept is only at 30%.

All patients need to go through mandatory fever checks. Basically, we need to make sure their temperatures are normal.

We are encouraging patients that only the patients arrive to the clinic and not their entire family, because we will not allow them.

We have also put in place high volume suction so that the aerosols produced are very very less. We are actually avoiding all aerosol procedures at the moment and we are only using aerosol procedures in case if it is absolutely needed or mandatory. Otherwise we are trying to sort things out without generating any aerosols.

Sterilization protocols have been upped, the frequencies has been upped. End of the day, and in between patients also, the entire clinic is sterilized before we accept the next patient in.

All these things have already been put into place to help us and maybe even prepare us for the future. Because we are looking at a complete change in how we are going to approach the dentistry eventually.

*Disclaimer: Please consider the information in this video/article most recent as per date and medical recommendations towards COVID-19 may change as the situation evolves.