Read this guide to learn some of the common infection control mistakes with your dental equipment you could be making in your dental clinic.
As a dentist, you should know that your pieces of dental equipment in Brisbane are meant to help you treat your patients effectively. However, without proper care, these pieces of equipment can cause infections in your patients. As a dental professional, the safety of your patients and infection control is a priority. You should therefore ensure that your clinic is up to date on the required infection control training and infection control protocols.
Just because your clinic has always done something in a certain way, does not mean that is the correct way. Best practices and protocols are constantly changing. For the safety of your patients and clinicians, reviewing current infection control protocols should be at the forefront of your priorities. Read on to learn some of the most common infection control mistakes you could be making and fail to realise.
Not sterilising slow speed handpieces between each patient
Slow speed handpieces are semi-critical devices. This means you may think disinfecting with surface disinfectants and using plastic barriers is proper control for infection. This is not the case for the CDC because according to the CDC, handpieces are an exception to this rule. This is mainly because studies have shown that handpieces can get contaminated internally with patient materials and your next patient could be exposed to infectious materials.
According to the CDC, handpieces should be heat sterilised after each patient to keep your dental equipment safe. To be compliant with the recommendations from the CDC, it is important to have more than one handpiece to ensure they have the required time to be sterilised in between patients. You cannot say that it is too expensive to buy more than one handpiece because the CDC will not entertain such an excuse. Dental offices are businesses and to run a business, you should incur expenses. Your office would not choose not to purchase a steriliser because it is too expensive. You should know that running a business comes at a cost.
Believing all disinfectant wipes are effective at cleaning blood
If you want to disinfect clinical contact surfaces, you should clean it of debris such as blood, saliva, bioburden, exudate and have it disinfected. The wipe and discard wipe method is often used to first wipe for the cleaning debris because the debris can cause an interference with your disinfectant’s effectiveness. A new wipe is used in a second pass to disinfect.
The CDC requires at least an EPA-registered hospital disinfectant to be used. If there is visual contamination of blood on the surface, the CDC requires an intermediate level product to be used for cleaning. According to the CDC, not all disinfectant products can be used as cleaners unless the product is suitable for such use. You should therefore ensure that you are cleaning with an effective cleaning product.
When choosing cleaning products for your dental equipment in Brisbane, it is important to consider the ability of the cleaning product to clean. It is important to know that alcohol is a poor cleaning agent when organic materials such as saliva, bioburden and blood are supposed to be cleaned.
