Palo Alto Dental Wellness

What a week! Thanks to my Palo Alto Dental Wellness Team for doing what they do and so well! Loved our holiday dinner!

How many crooked witches teeth did we extract and put in the jar? Any guesses? Stay tuned...who's going to win our gift bag??

Looking forward to this!

Birthday season! Happy birthday Nicole & Isabel! Celebrations at PADW!

Today’s plan, investing in knowledge for better patient care

I voted! Did you?

This makes me happy! We’re neighborhood faves!

Woohoo! Fit test done! Ready for patients on Monday!

We hope this note finds you and your family in good health. Our community has been through a lot over the last few months, and all of us are looking forward to resuming our normal habits and routines. While many things have changed, one thing has remained the same: our commitment to your safety.

Infection control has always been a top priority for our practice and you may have seen this during your visits to our office. Our infection control processes are made so that when you receive care, it's both safe and comfortable. We want to tell you about the infection control procedures we follow in our practice to keep patients and staff safe.

Our office follows infection control recommendations made by the American Dental Association (ADA), the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). We follow the activities of these agencies so that we are up-to-date on any new rulings or guidance that may be issued.

You may see some changes when it is time for your next appointment. We made these changes to help protect our patients and staff. For example:

· Our office will communicate with you beforehand to ask some screening questions. You'll be asked those same questions again when you are in the office.

· You will be asked to wear a mask before you enter our facility

· You will be asked to wait in your car once you arrive and to phone our office to let us know you are here.

· Staff will come out to check you in, review screening questions and take your temperature

· We have hand sanitizer that we will ask you to use when you enter the office. You will also find some in the reception area and other places in the office for you to use as needed.

· You may see that our waiting room will no longer offer magazines, children's toys and so forth, since those items are difficult to clean and disinfect.

· Appointments will be managed to allow for social distancing between patients. That might mean that you're offered fewer options for scheduling your appointment.

· We will do our best to allow greater time between patients to reduce waiting times for you, as well as to reduce the number of patients in the reception area at any one time.

We look forward to seeing you again and are happy to answer any questions you may have about the steps we take to keep you, and every patient, safe in our practice. To make an appointment, please call our office at 650 322- 7239.

Thank you for being our patient. We value your trust and loyalty and look forward to welcoming back our patients, neighbors and friends.

Sincerely,

Dr Singh and Team

This is what is happening in my profession currently:

Shared with permission from authors Javier Victor Duran, DMD, and his wife Nicole Siddell-Duran, RDH. They encourage all dental professionals to share and send this letter to all who will listen (feel free to copy and paste.)

An Open Letter to the ADA, CDC, OSHA, and government officials:

We dental professionals, are writing to express our very real need for urgent guidance and help during the COVID-19 outbreak. Understandably our healthcare organizations, dental associations, and government have all called on us to make every effort to keep patients out of the ER. With good logic, we have been mandated to restrict our treatment to emergencies only. We have been required to tally our PPE, and urged to donate our surplus. Additionally, we have been asked to list our skills for use on the front line in combating this virus. All this we have done in the spirit of helping our fellow human, our medical colleagues, and our own altruistic desires as health care practitioners.

That being said it is clear that dental health is more than just alleviating acute pain. For years we have been educating our patients that our oral and systemic health are intimately related. From connections with diabetes, Alzheimer’s, prenatal birth weight, and more, our physician counterparts and patients were starting to perceive how oral health is essential. In the grips of a pandemic, it is perhaps a worthwhile reminder that historically until the advent of modern antibiotics, dental abscess was a
leading cause of death. At a time where we are being told about potential antibiotic shortages, where there is real concern of resistant bacteria and an opioid crisis, we cannot continue to simply throw prescriptions at people and hope for the best. Plainly put: we need to reopen our offices to care for our
patients.

However, we have some grave concerns. Multiple sources have stated that our profession is at the highest risk during this outbreak, higher even than respiratory therapists. This is due to the very nature of our work, which generates aerosols. While we have “recommendations” for PPE to protect the doctors and staff, we have no guidelines in regards to how to address these aerosols that can linger for up to three hours. Our dental offices are left scrambling for PPE, as our reputable suppliers have none to offer and we have donated much of what we had. We in the dental field are left talking amongst ourselves and brainstorming in the void of no guidance and limited help.

For many reasons, we are in a unique circumstance. We are predominately privately owned, but are depended on to serve the health of our public. Our work environment dictates that we cannot readily go back to work like many other businesses who can practice social distancing and proceed. We lack any clear guidelines despite being at higher risk than other fields; some of which have already been given definite instructions in how to safely reopen. We do not have access to the proper PPE, doctors are left scrambling to order from Amazon or to beg for a few masks from each other.

We are reasonable and highly educated people. We understand that in a worldwide pandemic our physicians and nurses at the front lines take precedence. If the reason we have not received guidance is because there has been insufficient time to develop it, or that it is simply not known, then we request that you state this. Should this be the case, then our profession needs specific financial help to ensure viability. We provide healthcare for our population, and unlike hospitals which have received federal and state funding, we are draining our own personal bank accounts and risking bankruptcy. We should not be left fighting for loans with fields that provide commercial services. We need real funds, real guidance, real assistance in procuring our PPE, and proper help in upgrading our operatories with whatever air filtration, purification devices or methods are determined to be effective for the safety of ourselves and our patients.

Thank you and we look forward to working together with you to help protect one another.

Thanks to Maxar for taking the initiative and fabricating face shields for us to help keep the team safe as well as our patients safe!

A sincere thank-you to Maxar from all of us here at Palo Alto Dental Wellness. Thanks to your contribution and effort, we will not only be able to see our urgent patients and keep them safe but also keep our dental team safe. Thanks also to all the volunteers that made this possible.

Fabricating Face Shields for Healthcare Workers at the Frontlines of… Maxar is leveraging cutting-edge spacecraft manufacturing capabilities to make thousands of face shields for healthcare workers.

Dear valued patient:

In an effort to support national efforts to fight the COVID- 19 pandemic, our practice is taking the following steps to help assure your health and well-being and that of our community:

• We are following directives from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as a way to limit patient and staff exposure to this virus.
• Your health, and the health of our dedicated staff, matters to us, so going forward we will suspend all non-emergency care for three weeks.
• Patients will be seen only for urgent and emergency dental needs.

We will contact you soon to reschedule routine hygiene appointments. If you are already scheduled for an urgent issue, we will contact you the day before your appointment to discuss your health status, health screening protocols and confirm whether the appointment should be kept. Of course, please call us right away if you have a dental emergency or need immediate care.

The safety and well-being of our patients continues to be our primary concern. We will continue to monitor the status of COVID-19 nationally and within our community and keep you up-to-date regarding our plans to reopen for business as usual.

I urge you to contact us if you have any questions or concerns. We can be reached by phone at 650 322-7239 or by email to [email protected] and will respond as soon as we can.

Thank you,

In Observance of the Holiday Our office will be closed from December 23rd through January 3rd. We will be back in the office on Monday January 6,2020!

Work Family!
🎄 @ Evvia Estiatorio

Guilty pleasures for the holiday! Thank you Dr Scott Fross & team!

Please help us make a child's Christmas wish come true!🎄🤶🧸

Happy Thanksgiving🥧🦃🥰
In observance of the Thanksgiving holiday our office will be closed on Thursday 11/28th & Friday 11/29th

Happy Halloween!!🎃🧚🦄🦷 🦄
💪

Starting out our morning with a double dose of cuteness! Thank you for bringing in these cuties😊🌞