Many of our patients will have seen the announcement on Thursday 28th May by the Chief Dental Officer of England that dental practices were to be allowed to re-open from Monday 8th June. This was welcome news indeed, however, the profession was not notified beforehand and no thought had been given to PPE availability, guidance on what procedures were safe to provide and staffing levels especially the access to childcare. In addition, the social distancing rules currently in place will severely restrict the amount of patients any practice can have in the building at any one time.

At Zetland Road we had been planning for a re-opening in June and had been working hard to get everything in place so that we could open at the earliest opportunity. We have a limited amount of PPE with more on order so that we can at least start to catch up on all those patients we have been unable to see. As we are sure you will understand our priority in the first few weeks will be people who have been having problems whilst on lock down and so we will be contacting all those that have called the practice in trouble over the next few weeks.

Guidelines on the type of treatment that we are deemed safe to provide were issued yesterday by the Faculty of General Dental Practitioners at the Royal College of Surgeons. The concern is over our producing aerosols which is the fine mist created by the coolant on our drills and scalers which could pick up virus from someone who is unknowingly infected. For this reason the range of treatments that we can offer is governed by the country’s alert level which currently stands at level 4 on a scale of 1 to 5. As the level of infection drops and the alert level gets closer to 1 then the more treatments that we can offer.

Please be assured that dental practices have for many years operated with the highest level of infection control outside of an operating theatre and we have enhanced these further for everyone’s safety and peace of mind. This means that the practice will look a little different, as will the staff in their PPE, when you visit the practice at the current time.
We would like to thank everyone who has contacted the practice in the past few months for their understanding and patience at our not being able to see you. Hopefully with the restrictions starting to lift we will be able to catch up with the backlog and get people seen and out of difficulty.