Dear Patient,
I hope this letter finds you and your family in good health. Our communities have been through a lot over the last few months, and all of us are looking forward to resuming our normal habits and routines. I would like to firstly thank all our patients for your understanding while our clinics were closed for dental services.
Many of you will have seen the Government briefing yesterday which stated that dental practices would re-open on the 8 June.
The detail behind this was stated in a letter sent to all dental practices in England from the Chief Dental Officer, which states:-
'we are asking that all dental practices commence opening from Monday, 8 June for all face-to-face care, where practices assess that they have the necessary IPC and PPE requirements in place".
In this statement, IPC (Infection Prevention and Control) and PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) are critical to ensure that on opening our staff and patients are kept safe.
Due to the nature of work that we do, the risk of infection is extremely high especially when we are carrying out Aerosol Generating Procedures. An aerosol generating procedure, or AGP, is a dental treatment where water from instruments, working at high speeds in your mouth, combines to produce a spray. This spray produces aerosols that travel far within the surgery environment, contaminating on all surrounding surfaces.
Infection control has always been a top priority for our practice and our infection control processes are made so that when you receive care, it is both safe and comfortable.
You may see some changes when it is time for your next appointment. We made these changes to help protect our patients and staff. For example:
- Our surgery will communicate with you beforehand to ask some screening questions. You will be asked those same questions again when you are in the practice.
- We will carry out temperature checks of all patients and staff in the practice.
- We have hand sanitizer that we will ask you to use when you enter the practice. You will also find some in the reception area and other places in the practice for you to use as needed.
- You may see that our waiting room will no longer offer magazines, children's toys and so forth, since those items are difficult to clean and disinfect. We will erect Perspex screens and place floor markings to follow national guidelines.
- Appointments will be managed to allow for social distancing between patients. That might mean that you are offered fewer options for scheduling your appointment.
- We will do our best to allow greater time between patients to reduce waiting times for you, as well as to reduce the number of patients in the reception area at any one time. This may mean that you are asked to wait outside on in your car and called when your dentist is ready.
We have been working hard over the last weeks in preparedness for re-opening with many of the above measures already in place. However, the lack of available of PPE and other dental stock, is out of our control and until we have a good reliable supply of these essential items, our opening will be phased.
From June 8th we will continue to offer advice over the telephone and will select certain patients to come in for face to face care. This will be based on the urgency of the case which will be determined by a dentist over the phone, and only involve simple care and non AGP’s.
In addition to this, there are many patients who have been suffering with severe chronic dental issues, we have
made records of who these patients are and they will be given priority at this stage.
We will also still utilise the Urgent Dental Hubs that are setup and able to treat emergencies requiring an AGP.
After this phase and once we have a good supply of PPE, we will look to start routine care and give priority to those less urgent dental problems (chipped teeth, lost fillings etc.) and see patients who may be waiting on crowns, dentures to be fitted.
Our final phase will be to re-start all routine care such as examinations.
Please bear with us in this initial phase and I know it has already been extremely frustrating to have your dental needs put on hold for so long. However, a one week notice to start routine dental care is challenging and under no circumstances will I compromise the safety of our patients or staff by not implementing the appropriate IPC and PPE requirements.
Thank you once again for your understanding.
Dr Satinder Dhami
Clinical Director
Puresmile
020 8980 2890 
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