Now, switching gears to the matter at hand, although we’ve been fortunate to be equipped with some of the safety PPE from our mercury removal procedures, we have had to add even more safeguards to help clean the ambient air and reduce aerosols so that we can all be safe in the office environment. I wanted to do as much as I could to ensure that you feel confident about coming to see us so that you can continue to maintain your dental health.
Below, I will outline the steps of what we are currently doing to help ensure the safety of our patients and team. We ask you to please be patient with us as we navigate this new normal. Amanda and Cheryl will do their best to help you once you arrive. (We will be modifying it as time goes by so please keep that in mind. As stated earlier, our top priority is everyone’s safety.
1. When you arrive, please send us a text or call us, and wait in your car to be called. We hope that one day we can allow people to wait in our lovely reception area again and people being able to make themselves a nice cup of coffee or tea. But for now, we need to be safe and abstain from congregating. (We hate it but it has to be done 😩)2. No extra visitors, please. Just you, the patient, or if it’s a child who is the patient, please just ONE child and the parent. We understand the issues involved, and the way things are currently set up, this is what we are allowed to do.
3. We will take your temperature at the door. If the temperature is above 99 degrees, we will have to reschedule you, unfortunately.
4. Upon entrance to building, please squirt your hands with hand sanitizer and we ask that you to please refrain from touching any peripherals.
5. Once you are in the treatment room, we give you a pre-treatment mouthrinse to help reduce the microbial load in saliva.
6. In order to reduce microbes in our water lines, we use freshly ozonated water in our dental units. So any water that comes out of our handpiece is primed to destroy microbes on contact.
7. During procedures, we use the dentairvac.com aerosol control system that sucks up a lot of the aerosols that your mouth may put out.
8. We have air scrubbers (with charcoal filters) installed in our HVAC system throughout the building. In addition, we use a medical grade IQ Air filter to turn over the air, as well as air purifiers from Enviromedsciences.com installed in the main operatories.
9. We will be using P100 mercury respirators or n95 masks or equivalent during any drilling procedures. We sanitize our reusable P100 masks with ozone or wipe them down with Optim wipes.
We hope that all of these steps allow you to feel safe and protected in our office, so that you can feel comfortable seeing us. We miss all of our patients. We miss each other as team members. This is not what we wanted, but we will go above and beyond for you and for our team members. Thank you and please call or email with any questions. We look forward to seeing you and catching up on your quarantine stories!
Sincerely, Zina Aaron, DMD