Many dental practices closed at the start of the coronavirus lockdown in late March and will only be allowed to start reopening to patients from the 8th June. Dental care is an essential service and it is very important that access to dental treatment is available throughout the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
Dentistry is classified as being high risk for transmission of the coronavirus and additional procedures and policies will have to be put in place to restart dental services safely. These procedures are vital to ensure that clinicians have a safe working environment and patients are protected and feel safe when visiting the practice.
Educating patients on new procedures and policies
Many practices are now looking at what they may need to do in order for them to reopen. This will require additional policies and procedures in order to comply with patient safety and social distancing guidelines. Some of these additional procedures may include:
- The use of additional personal protective equipment (PPE) when treating patients
- More frequent use of preprocedural rinses
- Patient pre-screening questionnaires before appointments
- Temperature checks for patients on arrival
- The use of rubber dams for some treatments
Patients will also need reassurance that having their treatment is safe. This will mean communicating any additional procedures and policies that you have in place to improve their safety. These could include:
- Additional room cleaning and disinfecting procedures
- The addition of hand sanitisers throughout the practice
- The use of protective screens at reception
- Having less patients in the practice to maintain social distancing guidelines
It is important that patients are aware of many of these new procedures and policies so that they can follow them correctly where required and feel safe in the practice.
To help with this, we have added a range of COVID-19 related content to our media library to help educate patients and make them aware of this new COVID-19 information. This includes videos on the additional use of preprocedural rinses, extra room cleaning procedures and the availability of hand sanitisers.
The use of waiting rooms screens to communicate this type of information is especially important as leaflets and posters will no longer be allowed in waiting rooms. All of this can help you more easily restart dental services post lockdown.
Using a patient call system to help reduce risk
It is likely that many of the new coronavirus procedures will be in place for the foreseeable future and the use of additional PPE will be required for many months or even years to come.
Dentists that still collect their patients for the appointment from waiting rooms might now find this much more inconvenient. The new procedures may require clinical staff to remove their PPE before leaving the consulting room. This could be very time consuming for clinicians, as they will have to remove PPE and then replace this every time they collect a new patient.
The Envisage Dental TV patient call system can be used to help to alleviate this problem by allowing patients to be called directly from the consulting room by using the screens in the waiting room. This removes the need for you or any other member of staff to leave their room to collect patients.
The patient’s name, staff details and room name or number are displayed instantly on the TV screen when required. If you are a Software of Excellence user, then a patient can be called directly from the SoE EXACT patient record system with a single click. A patient call system can be installed quickly and cost effectively on many existing waiting room TVs.
More information
For more information about the Envisage Dental TV system then please call our sales team on 0114 399 0019, or contact us here.
If you are an existing Envisage Dental TV user and would like help adding the new content to your playlist then please contact our technical support team on 0114 399 0010, or email: support@numed.co.uk.
