By Lee Slaton, Vice President of Healthcare; Smart Training

In the past two weeks, I received probably a dozen calls from dental practices asking one of two basic questions:

“Lee, I have a team member who has tested positive for COVID-19,” or “Lee, a patient we treated two days ago just called to let us know they’ve tested positive for COVID-19. What do we do now?”

Fortunately, TDA has a web page that spells out the answers in a nice, logical format.

In addition to the detailed information on the page, it contains links to several other sites that address issues such as “what type of occurrences dictate that our team members be tested?”

The bottom line is: READ AND RE-READ. What I mean by that is, you should check in with authoritative, trusted sources at least a couple of times a week. This is a new virus, and we’re learning more about it every day. As doctors and scientists learn more, recommendations for treatment and prevention change.

My go-to sources are several different pages on the CDC website that coincidentally are referenced on the TDA page mentioned above. The CDC does a good job noting when pages were updated to reflect the latest knowledge and recommendations. It only takes a couple of minutes to check these sites to see if the recommendations or knowledge base have changed.

Smart Training is offering free of charge (for the next year) a package of training modules that includes OSHA and HIPPA-related courses and a module on recommendations for the Coronavirus in dentistry. You can sign yourself or your staff up for the free training here. Smart Training has assisted more than 15,000 dental professionals with their compliance needs over the last eight years.
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