Infection Control

Infection control is of utmost importance for the safety of our staff and our patients. We follow the standards set out by the Manitoba Dental Association and in many areas exceed their requirements.

Some of the things you may notice during your visits is all our instruments are bagged in kits. Once sterilized, and stored in proper bags, the instruments can remain sterile for up to 6 months. As this technique requires an increased number of instruments, many offices do not bag the majority of their instruments, and just store them in drawers or on shelves. With this technique, instruments only remain sterile for up to 6 hours.

Something else you may notice is our x-ray equipment use plastic barriers on them. These barriers increase our ability to acquire the x-ray image without contaminating the equipment. 

A behind the scenes measure we take at the office, which is not a requirement by the dental association at this time, is testing of our sterilizers. In addition to steralizer indecators with each load, every month our sterilizers are tested to ensure they are working properly and that the instruments we use are safe patient after patient. To further ensure the quality of our infection control process, as of October 2008 we have upgraded our main sterilizer to a state of the art, fully automated sterilizer. This allows for better monitoring of the sterilization process to help ensure instruments are sterile, and catch any problems with the sterilization cylce as quickly as possible.

If you have any questions or concerns about any of our infection control procedures, please feel free to talk to any of our staff, or to Christel directly, as she is the individual in charge of overseeing our infection control measures.

Thank you for taking an interest in your safety.