Safedentistry

Your front-page article on the current issues in dentistry in Scotland yesterday (“Covid disarray threatens a dental health disaster”) identifies one of the causes of the slow return to normal practice being the lack of personal protection equipment (PPE) for Aerosol Generating Procedures (fillings, crowns, root canals, some hygiene procedures).

Dentists are currently required to wear PPE to a standard that is the same as that used in intensive care units where patients are suffering from Covid-19 – at a time when the risk of meeting someone who has Covid-19 is low and getting lower.

This risk could be reduced to almost zero by testing dental staff regularly and testing patients the day before an aerosol-generating procedure – there is excess capacity in the testing system at the moment. Infection control in noncovid dental practice is already of a very high standard and normal dentistry should now be resumed.

This would allow patients immediate access to a dentist and prevent a number of dental practices from going out of business and closing. Plans could be made for moving to the higher standard PPE if numbers increase again and the risk level changes.

The present route map for dentistry is moving a public

health emergency into a new public health crisis for dental health and urgent steps need to be taken to ease the regulations as a matter of urgency.

(DR) DREW SMART

Muirs, Kinross