What do we do to protect you at Absolute Dental!

As a provider of dental care, we want to ensure that we and our patients are not exposed to the risk of infection. We find that the most effective way of achieving this is implementing a robust policy for cross infection control. We have many governing bodies who help us to achieve best practice, including  the Department of Health and  the Health and Safety executive. 

Some of our cross infection control is obvious when you seen the team in uniform, wearing gloves and surfaces being cleaned but there is a tremendous amount that goes on behind the scenes.....................................................

How does it all work?

Effective management of your protection comes into play a long time before patients cross the threshold at Absolute. 

It all starts with staff! we need to help prevent cross infection from ourselves to others and this includes immunisation for all sorts of conditions like rubella,  hepatitis, pertussis, and the more common ones like flu. These early interventions are carried out  at or even before our induction training, which is undertaken by all members of the team and is updated at our regular practice meetings. We hold these frequently at Absolute so that we can all update on current best practice. 

What else do we do to protect our staff?

Good thorough hand hygiene, personal protective equipment such as gloves, face masks and glasses. Uniforms as well form part of our cross infection control. 

We make every effort to reduce the risk of cross infection, which is why it is so important that patients inform us of their general health as there may be some factors which may affect not only dental health but affect some of the treatments we provide. The questions we ask change frequently as new evidence based information and research comes to light. 

What happens around the rest of the practice?

We can separate different areas into  zones around the practice depending on which activity takes place,  as there are different regulations which apply. e.g. In any kitchen area there are designated cleaning products including colour coded buckets and mops to ensure the correct one is used for each area. 

Treatment rooms.

In the treatment rooms we carry out numerous tasks including flushing through the water lines with decontaminants. This is done on a daily basis and we carry out stringent dip slide tests to test the effectiveness of the system. The surfaces of the treatment rooms are cleaned before and after each patient and we use  as many disposable products as possible to limit the chance of infection. You may have noticed that the instruments we use come in packs. This is done at the end of the sterilisation cycle and packs are rotated after date stamping. All of the instruments we use in the treatment rooms are transported to the decontamination area in lidded boxes, reducing risk even further. 

 

 

What happens in the decontamination room?

There is a clear and robust process which takes place in this room and  these processes have an audit trail, which helps us to identify that equipment used in the process is effective and that every stage of the process is carried out and audited. This includes, in the first instance, use of a washer/disinfector. This washes the instruments at high temperature to remove surface debris and is audited by two different processes. Next, instruments are examined under a magnified light to check for debris and where necessary put through the washer/disinfector for a second time. Protein soil tests help us to identify the levels of contamination and are also audited regularly. 

Instruments then are processed through the steriliser which  has checks each cycle to ensure the correct sterilisation parameters are being met. Once sterilised the instruments are then bagged, date stamped and stored. Incidentally, these bagged instruments are checked and re-sterilised  before they reach their expiry date.

 

The equipment in this room is of the highest quality, regularly serviced and maintained, an all housed behind a glass wall so that you can see the process at any stage, first hand, to give you reassurance.

This is a brief overview of some of what goes on in our world of cross infection control, some of it more obvious to the eye than others,  and all done to help protect you at Absolute!

 

Maureen