IS YOUR DENTAL OFFICE UP TO PAR??

How much do you know about your dental office? For instance, in our office, we do not use the city water of Atlanta. Instead, we have a closed system of water for delivery to our patients. We purchase distilled water for the office to help clean our sterilizers and use when treating our patients. Our closed system ensures cleanliness for patients who may have immune systems that are depressed, from radiation or chemo therapy, systemic disease, or HIV. Plus it is just clean. We fill up our bottles for each operatory and the water that comes out of our handpieces for cleaning or fillings, etc. is clean. Each week, we flush our lines so no water will stagnate in the lines with something like bleach, but made for our water lines. Not all offices have this feature, so you should ask them if they do. Another service we provide is using Emory Healthcare Services to check our sterilizers to ensure proper sterility. We place "spore strips" in the autoclave and send the "sterilized" strip weekly to Emory for testing. This is called "Autocheck."

If for any reason sterility is not achieved, we would have the time and dates to further investigate.

Of course, we use "universal precautions" when treating all patients. This means we say everyone is a possible candidate for spreading "germs." New gloves are used on every patient and taking off for us to check or work on other patients, so we "break" the possibility of contaminating our next patient. All rooms are "wrapped" with plastic to prevent fluids from contacting the counters or handles and then we wipe the rooms down after each patient. Then we rewrap the room and get it ready for the next patient. Finally, ALL metal instruments and handpieces are sterilized and we use as much disposable materials as possible to run a very clean office. If you ever have any questions on our protocol, please ask us. We are proud of how clean we keep the office.