#Open dental practice full#

Firstly, and most importantly, safety for you as a patient and for the dental team needs to be maintained so social distancing, allowing any mist in the surgery to settle, and the thorough cleaning of surfaces, all takes a significant amount of time.

#Open dental practice full#

However, whilst the full range of care CAN now be delivered there are additional complexities that have come to the fore as a result of the last 8-months. This news is really welcome news for us all as your dentist can now вЂњfinish the jobвЂќ that has been started by managing urgent care needs. This confidence in the safety of dentistry has allowed the Scottish Government to announce that dentists can now deliver the full range of care that was available under the NHS prior to lock-down.

These safety processes have been tried and tested, and shown to be safe and there has been a gradual increase in the range of NHS dental care available, but this has had to be carefully planned nationally, in order to ensure everyoneвЂ™s safety. As a result, when the First Minister announced during the summer that dental practices could open their doors to treat patients with emergencies as the first part of the Phased recovery, your practice was one of the first in the country to open. Since then, everyone in your dental practice has worked incredibly hard to design processes and procedures to ensure that anyone who enters, patient or staff, is kept safe. This fine mist or aerosol could pose a risk in terms of transmission of the virus that causes COVID-19. This step was taken in part to support social distancing by reducing the close contact between patients and dentists in a practice and in part because when you dentist provides treatment for you the drills and cleaning tools used create a fine mist of a mix of water and your saliva. As you know the provision of routine dental care has also been affected, with the Chief Dental Officer closing all the NHS dental practices in Scotland, when Lockdown was imposed in March of last year. You will be well aware of the impact that the risk of COVID-19 has had on every aspect of what was вЂnormalвЂ™ life, particularly in the central belt.