#206 Key Highlights from the Association for Dental Safety Meeting

The Compliance Divas recently attended the annual conference of the Association for Dental Safety and share their insights and take-aways from the meeting presentations.   The Divas also have a special promotion for ADS membership - see below.

Resources:

• ADS membership application - https://www.myads.org/membership-application  Use code DIVAS50.
• Association for Dental Safety - https://www.myads.org

                                                 https://www.thecompliancedivas.com

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:05

Welcome. I'm Leslie Cannon. I'm Mary Gavoni.

SPEAKER_01 0:09

I'm Linda Harvey. I'm Olivia Long, and together we are the Compliance Divas.

SPEAKER_00 0:24

Hello and welcome to the Compliance Divas Podcast. This is Leslie Cannum, and I'll be your moderator for today's podcast. We bring clarity and simplicity to compliance by navigating regulatory compliance to keep you on course. Please subscribe to the Compliance Divas Podcast through your favorite podcast app or on our website, thecompliancedeevas.com. And the resources we mentioned during our podcast can be found on the compliancedeivas.com website. We always welcome questions to support at thecompliancedivas.com. Well, it is my pleasure to provide a recap on one of our favorite meetings of the entire year. And for those of you who are not sure what that is, that would be the Association for Dental Safety, formerly known as OSAP. Mary and Olivia and I and Linda have some great comments to bring to you regarding our time in exploring the various different courses and the various different offerings from the Association of Dental Safety. First of all, I was thrilled to talk with Linda about a new program called Ask ADS. Ask ADS is very similar to a chatbot or a chat GBT, but in a function that is exclusively for Association of Dental Safety trusted resources. Now, when I go to ChatGBT to look something up, I may ask a very broad question and get a broad answer from multiple resources. And I don't always know if it's tried and true resources that I can rely on. So Association for Dental Safety created Ask ADS so we could ask questions and get not only answers that are reliable and trusted information, but also get resources to back up the responses. So Linda wanted to make sure that everyone knows about this because Ask ADS is available to everyone for a short time only. And we encourage you to check it out. Ask any kind of question, like for example, how should I set up a sharp injury plan with an exposure incident protocol? Or you could ask questions about safety data sheets, anything, ocean, anything infection control related to dentistry, and you're likely to get some very good information. Now, this becomes a members-only type of feature. I'm not sure when, but we probably have access to the general public for at least a month or so. I encourage everyone who listens to the Compliance Divas podcast to check out Ask ADS. And you'll have to go to the Association for Dental Safety website. That information will be provided for you in our show notes as one of the resources. Now, what I'd like to do is I'd like to bring Mary into the conversation to recap some of her big takeaways from the ADS meeting.

SPEAKER_02 3:35

Mary. Thank you, Leslie. This was a great meeting as it always. And the Divas have arranged with ADS to allow our subscribers and our listeners to get a 50% discount on their first year of membership. So that would be a $120 membership for $60 using the code Divas D-I-V-A-S all caps 50. We will also put in the show notes the link to the membership application. So you can click on that and again remember that the code is Divas50 and enjoy a 50% discount on your first year of membership, which then allows you to continue to use Ask ADS and all the fabulous resources from ADS. In terms of some really great little nuggets of information on various topic areas that we receive, one of the things that we experienced was a great presentation about how to deal with patients when things go wrong. And there was a lot of talk about transparency, making sure that you are open and honest with patients about what happened, let them speak their truth and talk about what they believe happened to them and explain to them, take ownership of some mistakes that were made and so forth. But always, of course, working with your legal counsel to make sure in your liability insurance company to make sure that you're following what they would want you to do if there was some type of an error that happened. We heard a lot of really great information from Dr. Brett Kessler, who's the president of the American Dental Association. Very inspirational in his presentation about how he is in recovery and gives back to dental patients who are also in recovery, helping them to be rehabilitated and some really, really inspirational things that he has done. The other thing, and I'm gonna overlap just a teeny bit into Saturday because the Saturday program little nuggets were my favorites from the whole meeting. One of them on emergency procedures. And the main message coming through is practice so that you know what to do because you may think you know what to do, and then you forget when an emergency does happen. Remember that one of the most important medications, if you will, that you may have to help out your patients is oxygen, making sure that your oxygen tank is appropriately pressurized and full. If you are administering a rescue inhaler to your patients because they have asthma, consider using a spacer with that inhaler, and it's pretty inexpensive to buy a plastic spacer so that you get better absorption of the medication. And another little tip that I learned was that if you have a patient that has symptoms from one or more body systems like breathing and then stomach issues, think anaphylaxis and be prepared for that. Challenge, of course, is that epi pens are still very expensive. We're gonna do a podcast in a few weeks about epinephrine and emergency kits that I think will be very helpful. And another little nugget I loved was the recommendation that we have chewable aspirin in our emergency kits now because that's one of the first things you do if there's an impending heart attack. So those were my most favorite things besides, and we'll talk a little bit about the issues of chemical hazards from 3D printing.

SPEAKER_00 7:50

Mary, that was a great recap. You know, I also want you to be recognized because you did an amazing pre-conference course, and yours was on communication skills and communication skills that we need to use not only all the time in running an effective dental practice and communicating with patients, but you also pointed out the communication skills that we can use if we have a situation where a patient is disgruntled or unhappy, which was dovetailed very nicely into our theme for the pre-conference, where we worked on uh workplace violence prevention. We had some great speakers, starting out with Erin Kennedy. Dr. Kennedy gave us information on how to thrive in dentistry with mental health and wellness, and she gave us some really great tips on maintaining our own ability to avoid burnout, I guess is the bottom line. And that seems to be an issue with dental professionals everywhere. And when you're on the edge of burnout, it's easy to snap and to make snappy responses, which is where Mary's information, clear mind, strong voices, and mastering communication skills under stress, really is a good follow-up to Dr. Kennedy's course. I will toot my own horn. I gave a course on workplace violence prevention. It was a train the trainer type of program, which dovetailed nicely into the immediate immediately following my presentation was uh Chief David Lash, who is a police chief, and he gave a presentation on avoiding, denying, and defending the model that is used. It's uh previously uh called run hide fight. And he gave us information on a real live active shooter incident where he was a commander and unfortunately an officer did lose his life, but it took place in a hospital. And as he explained how these incidents occurred, helped to uh provide us with more clear information on what we should do to be better prepared. And at the same time, I also want to recognize Olivia, who gave an incredible presentation on ethics. I'd like to turn the microphone over to Olivia to give us her best takeaways and also to provide us with a little bit of information on some of what she spoke about and why ethics are so important in dentistry. Olivia?

SPEAKER_01 10:21

Thank you, Leslie. I actually co-presented with Sherry Landes, who works with a very, very large DSO. And the title of that course was the DSO Forum: Beyond the Breach Strategies for Managing and Preventing Dental Infection Control Failures. And during that course, we referred to CDC's approach to an infection control breach with potential of risk of bloodborne pathogen transmission, and how decision making would be divided into two categories. Category A, meaning patient notification and testing is warranted. And category B, you consider the factors of potential risk of transmission, public concern, the duty to warn versus harm of notification. So we walked through that process. And it was really interesting listening to Sherry talk about how to develop the culture of compliance in a large organization such as that that she works in. And then I really enjoyed Dr. Reznick's program on the update on emerging and returning infectious and vector-borne diseases. And I was quite surprised with the information. I know we've done some podcasts on measles, but with the measles, if you were born between 1963 and 1967, you should discuss a booster with your medical professional. We see measles outbreak. The early version of the vaccine was not effective. There were two versions, and I guess one of them was not effective. And severe cases of measles can result in brain swelling. And it's interesting that with the flu, one person can infect one to four people. But with measles, if you have the measles, you can infect 12 to 18 people. So those statistics were staggering, I thought. And then I also enjoyed the management of medical emergencies and dental offices, which Mary did a beautiful job summarizing. And I listened to Busting the Myth of the Past, Disinfection Today. It was a product demonstration with Michelle Strange. Thought she did a wonderful job going through the product line. But Michelle, what she brought new to the table that I had never thought about was using two wipes, having a wipe in each hand to avoid cross-contamination as you're going through and disinfecting like the air water syringe holder, handpiece holder. And also being careful not to put uh a quad on a camera lens using the hydrogen peroxide one and how the with the curr product they have the hydrogen peroxide-based disinfectant white color green, and the other one is red, so we don't accidentally select the wrong product. So I thought that's really good information for clinical people in the field. And then I did do the ethics portion for the ADS meeting, and comparable to what we discussed in one of our previous episodes, I discussed the trend of doing TikTok videos and making sure that we don't have someone's information being divulged, whether it's something that's left behind, like a patient's diary that was left behind that a dental assistant read from, or somebody's radiographs on display on the monitor that's visible in the video. And so we went into the different principles of ethics, such as patient autonomy, always allowing the patient to be in the decision-making position in selecting treatment and sequencing of treatment, even though the clinician makes their recommendations and provides education. And then the concept of non-maleficence, where it's do no harm to the patient. Never would we want to be impaired trying to serve a patient or not working with our staff properly and supervising this proper scope of duties. Also, the principle of beneficence, which is that of doing good to promote the patient's welfare and not being driven by, for example, you have the ethical duty to put the patient first. So maybe the PPO does not pay it that way. So this does involve serious conversations with the patient. And also a reminder: if a child we suspect is being abused, it is mandatory that we report child abuse. But if it's a battered adult, we have to respect their decision and their privacy if they opt not to report it. So we would never report and invade their privacy. We want to treat people fairly. So we talked a bit about insurance issues that can fall into the category of being unethical. So that's just a brief summary there. But all in all, I think it was a great meeting, as you all both stated. The vendor booths were beautiful and always loved uh interacting with different ones and learning from them. And it's always a pleasure to be with my fellow compliance diva. So that's always a treat.

SPEAKER_00 16:02

Well, Olivia, thanks so much for the wrap-up on your best takeaways and on your section as well. Another overriding theme was the dental unit waterline issues with the various different outbreaks that we've had. Dr. G. Shirley provided us a great in-depth uh discussion on what has happened and what cases he's investigated and where we're going with dental unit water and why it's important to monitor water quality and to take steps to make sure that we make water safe for our patients and for ourselves as dental workers who are exposed to dental unit water all day long. With that, we have a good wrap on our Association for Dental Safety class and programs that we went to that we attended at the annual conference. Our next annual conference is going to be coming to Utah in 2026. And so I encourage everyone to make plans to attend or at least purchase the recordings of the wonderful sessions. But before we log off, I know Mary had one more point that she wanted to make. Mary?

SPEAKER_02 17:13

Thanks, Leslie. One of the really great presentations that we heard on Saturday was from a lab technician who is also an OSHA safety consultant. And he talked about the hazards of 3D printing, which is becoming very, very popular in practices making appliances or guides for implants and so forth. And the the main message that he had was make sure that if you're considering incorporating 3D printing into your practice, that you do your due diligence before you buy the equipment. Make sure that you have not only space to install the place, the printer, but that it is an appropriate space, that there's appropriate ventilation because the alcohol that's used as part of this process is highly flammable, and you do not want to expose workers to any of the potential hazards from that alcohol or the other materials, the resins that are being used. So make sure that you have the appropriate space, the appropriate ventilation, and that everyone has appropriate training on these chemical hazards before you just start using this and then end up having a problem like a fire in your practice. So the 3D printing companies that make this equipment have a lot of information available. There's training videos available that you can access. But again, the main message was figure it out first, where it's going to go, where you're going to use it, where you're going to place it before you make that decision to dive into 3D printing.

SPEAKER_00 19:04

Mary, thanks so much for that. And I have frequently received questions from my clients and audiences about how to dispose of that highly flammable alcohol that is part of the spent alcohol or the spent resin from these 3D printing machines. This is all part of the hazard communication standard requirements that dentists are required to make sure that their employees have training, have the proper PPE, and understand how to work with these products. So that is a wrap for our podcast. And you can tell from our voices that we are very excited about what we learned this past weekend. And we encourage everyone to check out Association for Dental Safety for their boot camp, for their annual meetings, and for their website and become a member.

SPEAKER_02 19:55

And don't forget to use that special promotion code DIVAS50 for 50% off your first year of membership.

SPEAKER_00 20:04

With that, we bring clarity and simplicity to compliance to help you navigate regulatory compliance and keep you on course. Please check our show notes for the resources that we mentioned in this podcast. Submit your questions to support at the compliancedevas.com. And we would love if you would leave us a review at the end of the podcast show notes.