While visiting a dental laboratory, you would surely want to get professional and reliable services. In order to ensure this, it is important that the lab that you are going to visit is extremely careful about safety issues and uses advanced dental lab equipment, apart from following updated dental technology.
Every day, the dental professionals come in contact with a number of microorganisms, which can cause life threatening diseases like hepatitis B virus (HBV), tuberculosis, and even Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS). As the new HTM regulations have suggested, dental professionals must offer quality health services to all the patients and to do this, complete decontamination of the different dental lab equipments is a must.
Apart from autoclaving or sterilizing the dental non-surgical as well as surgical devices, the employees at dental laboratory have to be extremely careful while coming in direct contact with dental devices and patients. Thus, the risk of your employees getting infected by microorganisms is eliminated apart from ensuring that your clinical environment is absolutely hygienic.
In order to ensure the safety of the professionals working in dental labs, there are different types of effective personal protective equipments available in the market, including eye protection devices, gloves, masks, protective clothing, and face shield etc. Wearing gloves are one of the best tricks to avoid direct contact with patient’s mucus membranes or mucus. It is advisable to remove the gloves after treating one patient and re-glove before treating the next patient.
Alternatively, one can also use disposable gloves. It is a must to wear medicated gloves while dealing with advanced technology like full contour Zirconia which is one of the most popular trends these days and offers effective solutions to the patients. One can also utilize utility gloves that are used for cleaning environmental surfaces. Dental lab equipment too can be re-used after decontamination. But if there is any sort of puncture or crack, it would be better to discard them.
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It is very important to use the appropriate infection control precautions for patients as well as dental laboratory technicians as improper handling of contaminated instruments,such as impressions, casts and prosthetic appliances can result in cross-contamination and thus cross-infection to the personnel as well as the patient.All this can be taken care of by effective communication between the dental practice and the dental lab,and also the routine use of recommended infection control procedures and protocols can provide a safe working environment for those with potential occupational risks.