Dental Infection Prevention Case Study

Dental health is the key factor to preserve one’s good health as the mouth is the gateway to the body. People who tend to preserve their dental health have to pay a visit to the dentist almost every 6 months. Usually, the dental patients have many concerns related to the dental procedures and one of their main concerns is if the dental team follows accurately all of the infection control standards as it’s an important part of safe patient care.
Concerns about the spread of bloodborne diseases, highly infectious respiratory and other illnesses, require dentists to establish, evaluate, update and monitor their infection prevention and control protocols but there’s one big question that pops almost in every dentist’s head:
Can I balance between

However, it was determined that insurance plans would not pay this expenses, since they believed that infection control expenses were a part of all dental procedures. Dental practitioners believed that it would be very hard to try to gather these fees directly from the patients.
In another attempt to reduce the infection control costs, Dental practitioners thought about going green by utilizing not so much dispensable but rather more reusable items, this could possibly be the best technique regarding the cost and patient safety but some dentists were in doubt about their ability in achieving green practice during their daily dental procedures.
A few specialists have suggested some green dental practical steps as using reusable cloth pouches instead of sterilization bags for instrument packaging prior to sterilization. While this may spare cash and causes less waste, these cloth packs must be washed regularly to keep them looking great to the patients who see them. After a number of sterilization cycles, the cloth pouches have a tendency to lose its unique shading, making patients doubt about the property of the whole sterilization process.This discoloration may also lead to tarnishing of the dental

Those were most of the available green dentistry tips. On the other hand, dentists face a huge obstacle regarding the sterilization of handpieces as the life expectancy of a handpiece can be decreased from the sterilization process. Some dentists prefer to only disinfect the handpiece without sterilizing it in order to extend its useful life but that’s put their patients at a great risk as studies have proved that both high speed and low speed handpieces that are not autoclaved can be a source of infection.
There’s a study where they tried to use two handpieces in about 160 tests where the prophy point end was defiled in vitro with Geobacillus stearothermophilus, it was resolved that the engine became infected in 20% of the cases. Then again, when the interior motor was infected, the organisms were transmitted to the prophy edge in 47% of 160 other specimens. In another in vivo investigation of 20 subjects, 75% of the 420 samples acquired from low-speed handpiece/prophy angle systems were contaminated with oral flora which means that even with the use of a simple prophy angle, the internal unit of the handpiece became