Patient safety

Patient safety

Our team want to ensure that every patient and visitor to the practice is safe. We are dedicated to meeting with the highest standards of cross infection control and health and safety. We regularly audit and train to ensure we meet our practice standards.
As an insight in too how we keep you safe we have included below some of the ways that we do this throughout the day.
When our clinical team arrive at the surgery they change into our clinical uniforms. Not wearing uniforms outside the dental practice is an integral part of our cross-infection control procedures helping to keep our patients, ourselves and our families safe.

The surgeries and clinical areas such as our dedicated decontamination room are set up for the day to sure that the highest standards of cross infection procedures are being met with.
To do this our specially trained team start by flushing the lines in the dental chair with purified and treated water, cleaning and preparing the sides, dental chair, x ray unit overhead light and spittoon, and getting out their instruments for the day. Between patients we clean and disinfect all work surfaces in the surgery and the dental chair.
Our decontamination room is full of the latest equipment, ensuring that instruments are processed correctly and sterilised to render them safe for use. Sterilised instruments have to be sealed in special pouches and stored away when not needed.

At the beginning and end of each session the nurse or hygienist will clean down and sign off that the surgery is fit for use and our cross infection control nurses Mrs Jennifer Sutcliffe practice manager, Miss Mandie Procter senior nurse, regularly spot check to ensure compliance.
PPE is used throughout the session for both patient and the team’s safety.

Any lab work in or out of the practice is thoroughly cleaned to ensure that we keep our laboratory technicians safe and it is disinfected before placement.
All of our equipment is regularly serviced and validated by contracted engineers.
Any health and safety issues such as equipment malfunction is dealt with by the team to ensure that patient and team safety is priority.
Audits, risk assessments are regularly completed and updated by our team.
We also have CCTV in place throughout the building, visitors to the practice must check in and we have alarms on exit doors, the surgeries are also lockable for confidentiality and safety reasons.

Thank you for reading
Jennifer Sutcliffe Practice manager GDC 137155