Cleanliness at the Dental Office

A dental office is where a clean, sterile environment is essential for patient's safety and peace of mind. Here are a few things to look or ask for to see if the office is up to code as far sterilization protocols are concerned.

As a general rule, in any office the instruments fall into 3 categories.

1. Disposable instruments, should only be used for one patient and discarded.
2. Sterilizable instruments that can be sterilized using steam, heat or chemicals.
3. Instruments that can be "cold sterilized" but this category should only comprise a very small percentage of instruments used.

Our Orange County Dental Office has to meet ADA standards for sterilization procedures and requirements. Although some states only require monthly testing of the sterilizer. You want an office that does weekly testing to see if the sterilizer is functioning properly. Furthermore, a 6 month log of all the testing should be available for your review.

As a redundancy to the weekly testing, all the individual bags used to sterilize instruments must have indicators confirming that the contents have indeed been sterilized.

The counters, chairs, light handles and anything that comes into contact with the patient or the dentist or the staff has to have a protective sheath. Since some areas are too large to have a protective sheath (such as counters), they should be disinfectable.

The floors of the treatment rooms and the sterilization area have to be easily cleanable and be made of a durable non porous material.

The sterilization area has to be separate from all the other areas or rooms in the office to minimize cross contamination.

Your Orange County dentist Aria Irvani DDS meets or exceeds all sterilization standards.

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Posted on February 7, 2009 11:24 AM | Permalink