We have previously written on this Blog about the need to leave 60 minutes between treatment appointments that generate an ‘aerosol’ from a drill or scaler etc HERE, and how this severely limits how many appointments we can offer a day.

These aerosol generating procedures or AGP’s as they are designated by the Office of the Chief Dental Officer (England) OCDO, carry this 60 minute ‘fallow period’ to allow these aerosols to settle & be removed/diluted to a safe level by passively ventilating air in the surgery by opening the windows.

This regulation is a blanket approach to all dental surgeries in England with no mechanical means of extracting the air, & are termed ‘neutral pressure rooms’. This is how most dental surgery rooms are currently.

We have recently been working towards adding high capacity extraction to all our 3 surgeries, which we can announce are now in place. Adding high capacity commercial air extraction units to our surgeries has now allowed us to reduce this ‘fallow time’ to 20 minutes as we can designate them as negative pressure rooms (as per the CDO’s guidance ‘Negative Pressure Room’)

These 12” extractors can remove 1550m³/hour, or well over 50x the volume of air of each surgery every hour, this being 8-10x that assumed by passive window ventilation and significantly more than the minimum 12x room volumes required to be classed as ‘negative pressure’.

In addition to these new extractors, we have HEPA air filtration units which we have been utilising since we re-opened after ‘lock-down’. These run constantly & provide a flow of 250-500m³/h of filtered air depending on the unit.

We are still only able to utilise 2 of our 3 surgeries as one permanently stays clean, but as you can see by cutting the time we have to leave these 2 ‘fallow’ it significantly increases the number of treatment appointments we can provide every working day from now on.

As social distancing rules have also been relaxed slightly to 1m+ we will also be able to have a total of 3 patients in the building, so long as a mask or face-covering is worn. As a healthcare premises we must ask that a face covering or mask is worn at all times in the building, apart from in the surgeries whilst undergoing treatment.

Patients who attend without a mask/face covering will be provided with a mask, & charged £0.50 per mask on top of any treatment costs incurred. This being their cost to us. Naturally we would prefer you wear your own to relieve pressure on our stocks.

Finally we would like to take the opportunity to say that even with the significantly increased costs of additional PPE & cross-infection control measures we have implemented at our practice, our treatment fees have not been increased nor will they be, and unlike some practices we are not charging for the additional PPE that we are having to use for your appointments & nor are we likely to.

Best regards

EADP

#staysafe #covidsecure #safeair