Safety in 2024

It has been five years since the COVID outbreak.  Most of us are scarred to some degree from the memories of employment uncertainty, social isolation, illness and quarantine, and polarizing debates on vaccinations, to name just a few.  Buzzwords like PPE, HEPA filtration, sanitization, social distancing, and long COVID became part of the lexicon of 2020 and beyond.

As frontline healthcare workers, dentists had to make changes to how we worked in order to improve safety for all.  Some of us put up temporary or permanent walls or doors, some of us ordered mountains of N95 masks, some of us had our “air changes per hour” measured by HVAC professionals, and some of us signed up for isolation gown subscriptions.  Five years later, many of these “enhanced precautions” are no longer present in most dental offices.  The general consensus is that the weakening of the not-so novel coronavirus to a more manageable cold-like pathogen means the inconvenient encumbrances had to be done away with in order to project a picture of normalcy. 

At Leslieville Dentistry, we continue to maintain vigilance in a more targeted way.  We identified the necessary precautions that we should take, and eliminated the environmentally unsustainable peripherals that have no added benefits.  We know our COVID cautious patients are thankful, but we are considering infectious diseases beyond just COVID.  With the recent widespread cases of pneumonia among adults and children, some of them requiring hospitalization, we cannot afford to be nonchalant about infection control.  As one patient asked me, “you BOUGHT those expensive machines, right?  If you have them, why WOULDN’T you just use them?”  I wholeheartedly agree.