2. During Dental Care
Use of Standard Precautions
At BIDC dental center, standard precautions on hand hygiene, use of personal protective wear and equipment (gloves, masks, eyewear), respiratory hygiene and cough etiquette, sharps and safe safety practices, sterile instruments and devices, clean and disinfected environmental surfaces is part of our routine sterilization process, policies and practices.
Standard precautions refers to the above minimum infection prevention practices that apply to all patient care, regardless of suspected or confirmed infection status of the patient, in any health care setting. Being JCI accredited, BIDC is audited on the quality, treatment and infection process controls. We continually educate, refresh and already train our dental care providers (dentists and staff) to comply with the critical elements of standard precautions protocols. When standard precautions alone cannot prevent transmission of infectious diseases, transmission-based precautions are taken. This second tier of infection prevention is used when patients have diseases that may or can spread through contact, droplet or airborne routes.
Use of Transmission-Based Precautions
Your normal dental clinics are not typically not designed for transmission-based precautions. At BIDC dental center, we place resource and are able to carry out airborne precautions for patients with suspected infectious diseases (such as coronavirus, tuberculosis, measles, or chickenpox) using JCI ambulatory care guidelines.
Should any risk based patients on possible contagious disease be identified, transmission-based precautions are applied. Patients are treated separately in designated treatment rooms and separate waiting areas apart of other patients. Full personal protective equipment (PPE) including disposal gown, N95 masks and face-shield are worn and properly discarded before exiting the treatment room. As much as possible, BIDC use disposable or dedicated patient-care equipment for all our dental treatments.
Cleaning and disinfection of these specific designated treatment room is additional prioritized after each use or set at the end of the day. The designated treatment room is meant only for transmission-based precautions and separate from other patients treatment rooms and levels. Your dentist changes rooms in between patients so that the prior used treatment room can be thoroughly disinfected and sterilized.
Treatment Room Ventilation
BIDC is a one-stop dental building, our dental building is designed for dentistry whereby ventilation vents and airflow design has been taken into consideration during the planning and design of our dental center. Each treatment room has fitted air suction vents that removes airborne contaminants. Your dentist inter-change treatment rooms after each patient to enable disinfection of used treatment room and settling of any airborne droplets.
Additional Oral Suction Equipment
Aside from high powered suction equipment internally installed on dental chair units used routinely in dental treatments. BIDC takes further steps for additional external intra-oral suction unit to remove and reduce aerosol spread into the air for specific aerosol based dental treatments.
Clinical Technique During Treatment
Pre-procedural mouth rinse with may be requested as additional preventive measures. We use European designed dental unit that are equiped with high-powered suction units that draws away any body secretion and vapours.
Personal Protective Equipment (PPE)
Your dentist and dental assistants are trained in proper technique on donning and doffing of masks, respirators and gowns. Standard basic PPE used for standard precautions include gloves, surgical masks and eyewear. Additional protective devices for transmission-base precuations include higher-grade masks (such as N95 masks), face shielf and disposable gowns.
Ultra-violet (UV) Pulse Light
An additional step to kill off virus in the airbourne and on surfaces added to our cleaning and disinfection flow of treatment room is the use of Ultra-violet (UV) Pulse Light. After each use, treatment rooms are sterilized additionally with UV light.