Hoburne Dental Practice in Christchurch

To all our patients:

We hope you and your friends and families remain in good health.

You may have heard that dental practices can open to routine care from Monday 8th June. It goes without saying that this is welcome news for everyone. The surprise announcement came during the prime minister’s daily update yesterday evening with no prior warning to the dental profession. This has given us a little over a week to put the final preparations to re-open into place. This time frame is somewhat shorter then the two to three weeks warning that the profession had anticipated. Nonetheless we have been extremely busy over the last 6 weeks preparing for re-opening.

At the time of writing we are planning to re-open on Monday 8th June but we just wanted to be clear that initially this will not quite be business as usual. The situation is still very fluid and guidelines are changing continually. While many things have changed, one thing has remained the same; our commitment to your safety.

Infection control has always been a top priority for our practice and you may have seen this during your visits to our surgery. There is currently no evidence that dental staff or dental patients have been affected by COVID to any greater or lesser extent than the general populations in the UK, Spain or Italy. This is despite dentists continuing to work right up to the outbreak. In some countries dentists have been allowed to continue working throughout the pandemic. Much of the profession feels that this is due to the robust infection control measures that we have always adhered to.

Our infection control processes are made so that when you receive care, it’s both safe and comfortable. We want to tell you about the infection control procedures we follow in our practice to keep patients and staff safe.

Our practice follows infection control guidelines made by the governing bodies. We are up-to-date on new guidance that has been issued. We do this to make sure that our infection control procedures are current and adhere to recommendations. We have also implemented some additional infection controls measures which go beyond national guidance including greatly enhanced surgery ventilation.

You will see some changes when it is time for your next appointment. We have made these changes to help protect our patients and staff. For example:

Our practice will communicate with you beforehand to ask some screening questions. You’ll be asked those same questions again at your appointment.

You will be asked to wait in your car and we will call you in by mobile phone when we are ready to see you – please make sure it is not on silent!

The waiting room will not be in use for the time being.

We have hand sanitiser that we will ask you to use when you enter the practice, this will be in the usual place in the lobby area.

We no longer offer magazines, children’s toys and so forth, since those items are difficult to clean and disinfect.

Appointments will be managed to allow for social distancing between patients. This will mean that you will be offered fewer options for
scheduling your appointment.

Staff will be wearing additional PPE especially for treatment appointments – please do not be put off by our appearance - we are still the usual friendly people beneath!

In order to comply with guidelines we will need avoid any general conversation that would extend the appointment duration.
We will do our best to allow greater time between patients to reduce waiting times for you, as well as to reduce the number of patients in the practice at any one time.

In the first 7-10 days we will be prioritising the assessment and treatment of all those patients who have contacted us with pain over the last 10 weeks. From then onwards we will contact those people who have incomplete treatment remaining from March. We will be seeing urgent patients first before contacting the remainder of our patient base.

We would ask you to try not to contact the practice at this extremely busy time for all of us unless you have a dental emergency. Please be rest assured that we will be in touch with all of you in due course to catch up with any missed appointments. If you do need to contact us then the best way is by telephone on the usual 01425 277245 number.

How you can help:

• With the exception of children and patients with carers, patients should enter the practice alone.
• A distance of at least 2 metres must be observed if another patient is present in the dental practice.
• Payment should be made by card where possible.
• Staff will not shake your hand.
• If you feel unwell between booking you appointment and attending your appointment, you should contact the practice by phone.
• Please do not arrive early to the practice.
• Please do not arrive without an appointment.
• Patients should come wearing a mask if possible or be prepared to wear one if required to do so.

We would like to thank all of our patients for their understanding and cooperation at this time.

We look forward to seeing you soon.

From all the team at Hoburne Dental Practice (29.05.20)