The Compliance Divas Podcast
Our podcast covers current topics such as infection prevention and control, OSHA and HIPAA compliance for dentistry. We discuss the latest regulatory information, answer frequently asked questions and give suggestions for dental practices to make compliance easy and sustainable. The Compliance Divas are a trusted source for consistent, accurate information based upon current guidelines, standards, science, and recommendations.
The Compliance Divas Podcast
Episode #46 Dental Assistants Recognition Week: Learn How to Get Certified in Dental Infection Prevention and Control
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In this special podcast the Divas celebrate Dental Assistants Recognition Week by providing information and tips on how access resources on Infection Control and how to become Certified in Dental Infection Prevention and Control
Welcome. I'm Leslie Cannon. I'm Mary Gavoni. I'm Linda Harvey.
SPEAKER_01I'm Olivia Juan, and together we are the Compliance Divas.
SPEAKER_00Welcome to a special edition of the Compliance Divas podcast on Dental Assistance Recognition Week. We bring clarity and simplicity to compliance by navigating the regulatory environment to keep you on course. You can subscribe to the Compliance Divas podcast through your favorite podcast channel or on our website, thecompliancedeivas.com. The resources we mentioned during our podcast can be found on the compliancedeivas.com website. Also, we encourage and value questions. So if you do have questions, submit them to support at thecompliancedeivas.com. My name is Leslie Canham, and I'm especially excited to be a part of the Dental Assistants Recognition Week podcast. I like to call it Hot Tips for Cool Dental Assistants. I've been a dental assistant and dental assisting has been in my bones for almost 50 years now. And I owe a lot of what I have learned along the way as a dental assistant to belonging to professional organizations like the American Dental Assistance Association and the State Association, as well as my local components. There is a week that is dedicated just exclusively to dental assistance. It's called Dental Assistance Recognition Week. It is also known as DARW, and it's always held the first week in March every year. This year it's March 6 through 12. And this is designated by the American Dental Assistance Association as the perfect time to acknowledge and recognize the versatile, multi-talented member of your dental team. Dentists in the United States and Canada will celebrate by honoring their dental assistants for the variety of duties they perform and helping them provide patients with quality dental care. Now I'm super excited about the theme for 2022, which is dental assistants, passionate about our patients, dedicated to our profession. And it acknowledges the growing importance of dentistry's role in health care and the responsibility of dental assistants. Dental assistants are a key part of the dental practice year-round and strengthen the entire practice and enhance patient satisfaction. Dental assistants are committed to professional development and quality care. And this is where I'm excited to provide a little bit of a bit of conversation surrounding how dental assistants can gain knowledge to help them be better at their role as healthcare providers. Linda, can you tell us a little bit about the CDC resources that dental assistants can tap into for free?
SPEAKER_03Yes, Leslie, dental assistants are such a wealth of knowledge in the dental team. Actually, they're the backbone, I think, of the dental team. They have their fingers on the pulse of the ordering, all the maintenance and the lab cases. They're the navigators of what's happening in the back. And so to help them maintain their strategy and support dental assistants, there's some great information in the public domain that's readily available to enhance their importance on the team as they grow in their profession as well. First is the 2003 CDC guidelines for infection control and dental settings that's easily downloaded from the CDC website. And as you mentioned, we'll have these resources that I'm talking about on our website as well for them. Then in 2016, the CDC created a summary document of this 2003 guidelines, and they created their checklist for dental settings. So that's resource number two. I like that resource because it's colorized, it's shortened, and it's really easy to read and follow in case if you haven't yet read the 2003 guidelines. And third, there's a mobile app that everybody can use. You can download it to your phone. It's a great way to check how you're doing in the realm of infection control. And all these things are free, Leslie, and it really helps support the dental assistants in their knowledge and just supporting them as the backbone of the practice in the clinical areas.
SPEAKER_00Linda, thanks for all that great information. And I think probably my favorite is the CDC checklist, because sometimes we don't know exactly what we don't know until we see it on a checklist. And with the CDC checklist, anyone, whether you've been in dentistry a long time or whether you're fairly new to the field, can take this checklist, walk around the office, and it helps guide you through the various different questions you should ask yourself to see how your practice measures up with infection control and safety. Olivia, can you tell us a little bit more about memberships in OSAP? How that is so important to help a dental assistant elevate their skills and their knowledge and be able to tap into some of the resources for through their peers in the profession.
SPEAKER_01Sure, Leslie. I think it's really important that we align ourselves with professional organizations such as OSAP to enhance our knowledge, our skill set, and also, Leslie, our sense of belonging, that we fit in with this group of people that's dedicated to the same mission or purpose, such as infection control and prevention. And really dental assistance, and I say that having been an office manager and an RDA for many years, uh we bring a lot of information to the dental practice, and we are really obligated and accountable to make sure that the information we're bringing to the practice is accurate and current. And we can do that by joining organizations such as OSAP. They prepare checklists and FAQs, they have the boot camp each year, which is invaluable in sharpening our skills and learning all the latest information on the topic of infection control and prevention and safety topics. They also have tools that dental assistants can use to make sure they are ensuring the safest dental visit. And having been a member of OSAP for many, many years, I really encourage the dental assistants out there to join this organization and benefit from the many resources that have been prepared. And they can also type in questions on the OSAP website to uh maybe it's something that they're not familiar with or they have a question about to get really good solid answers. So, once again, Leslie, really encourage the dental assistants to join OSAP and to consider taking full advantage of the resources that they make available because they have surely benefited all of the divas and in the start of our career as consultants.
SPEAKER_00I think we would all agree with that statement, Olivia. In fact, for myself, it's kind of funny that uh we plan for OSAP Symposium and now it's called Annual Conference. Uh, every year we we bookmark it in our calendar and we don't book anything else that would interfere with that date. If there's something else that comes up, OSAP meeting always gets top priority. And my husband likes to laugh at me because I tell my family, look, there's no weddings, there's no babies being born, don't plan any parties during the time that I'm going to be at OSAP meeting because mama is not going to be in town. I make this my highest priority, and I don't think I could do what I do as a consultant if I did not have the resources of OSAP. And I continue to go every year and I go to boot camp every year that I possibly can. It is so enriched my experience and knowledge and uh helps me see things that I maybe didn't think about before. Sometimes these uh new eyes uh that we uh see in our membership for OSAP will bring us uh information or conundrums that we face in dentistry that are actually quite uh uh uh universal, but we all never really thought about it individually. And we come up with solutions to conundrums with infection control and safety that way. So, Mary, can you tell us how a dental assistant can elevate their skills and actually become certified in dental infection prevention and control?
SPEAKER_02Absolutely, Leslie. Um, I think that um between all of the divas up to now, we could say probably that OSAP is a dental assistant's best friend in terms of infection um prevention. And perhaps that's one way that employers could recognize dental assistants during dental assistance recognition week is to gift them with an OSAP membership. I think that would be a great, great thing. So I'm so glad that we're um doing this podcast today about dental assistance recognition week. Next week, um during dental assistance recognition week, I will celebrate the 50th anniversary of when I first came to work in dentistry on March 10th. So um big milestone for me, kind of a scary number. Um, but I wish that I had had these kind of resources back then to learn more because I started out as an on-the-job trained assistant, fortunately worked for a very ethical practitioner and one who was an excellent, excellent teacher and was way back in the early days of infection control and dental practices, a stickler about instrument sterilization and so forth. So, if you're a dental assistant, perhaps starting out today, how do you learn about infection prevention? Well, the Centers for Disease Control, in conjunction with OSAP, has created several courses, and one of which is basic expectations for safe care. There are modules that you can access for free on the CDC website, and also the foundations course that um I believe Olivia and and Leslie mentioned earlier, the foundations for building the safest dental visit. Those are again free to access through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And there are also our links on OSAP's website. So these are great resources. Then over the last several years, what OSAP and the CDC and the Dental Assisting National Board have collaborated on is creating a certification in infection control for dental assisting, and they also created one for dental industry members. So the credential is CDIPC, Certified Dental Infection Prevention Coordinator. Um and it is something that we will put in the resources page so you can look at the whole process of educational requirements and taking the examination and then maintaining that um certification. And I think that it's a great investment in a dental assistant to feel confident in what they're doing because so many times the dental assistant is the person who is in charge of much of the infection prevention that goes on in the practice. And I misspoke. The the name of the credential is certified in dental infection prevention and control. So we will have all those resources listed on our website, thecompliancedeevas.com, so that our listeners can access them.
SPEAKER_00Mary, that's great information. And I love the idea of gifting an OSAP membership to the dental assistant in your practice. Uh something else that uh you mentioned that infection control does often fall on the shoulders of at least one dental assistant in the practice. There was an actual uh report or a study that was published uh by Danby, the Dental Assisting National Board, that that uh proves that to be true, that in a survey that was conducted, dental assistants are largely around the country responsible solely for the infection control in their dental practice. So, this gift of OSAP membership, along with these tools that we mentioned, will really help the dental assistant who is the chief strategist of the dental office from uh from making sure that treatment rooms are ready to go and that instruments are processed safely, to making sure that uh that the doctor runs on time or hygienists are able to operate uh efficiently, to making sure that lab cases are received properly and that everything is done. It's orchestrated in such a way that many times don't people don't recognize that besides cleaning instruments and assisting, and sometimes providing patient care, depending on the level of knowledge and skills, that the dental assistant really has a lot going on in the back of their mind to get through each day and keep everything running smoothly. What I'd like to do now is just call on each one of our divas to uh see if we have some ideas of how we might recognize and acknowledge the hard work of dental assistants in a dental practice and also help to bring this awareness to our patients who may not see how much their dental assistant really brings to the table. Linda, could you give us some ideas of how uh dental assistants might be celebrated during this special week?
SPEAKER_03Absolutely, Leslie. This is such a great time to do a little bit, something a little bit different. And so you mentioned patients. I think this is a great time to showcase the dental assisting team members to our patients, whether that's um through signs out front, something, a newsletter that goes out, an email, all different mechanisms, social media even, and just and have something that's public-facing so you can support the profession. And as we all know, we're always growing our members in the dental community. So make this may be an opportunity to um help um let's what's the word I want to use here, help um recruit dental assistants to our field of dentistry. So by seeing this all um out in the public domain and just you know how fun it is to be a dental assistant and all the roles and different aspects that you mentioned and I did earlier, from the lab to sterilization to ordering to maintenance, they're their orchestrator in the back of all this. And I would also like to point our listeners today to our June 9th podcast last year, where the divas spoke about the role of the safety coordinator. And so I would encourage everyone, if you haven't listened to that podcast, to scroll back on the compliancedevas.com website and listen to that. There's a lot of other great ways that they can support their dental sustained team there too, Leslie. Fantastic.
SPEAKER_02Mary, how about you? Do you have any tips for us? I do. I think that using social media is a great way to accomplish what Linda was talking about in helping to focus the attention of patients on that critical role that dental assistants play in their overall oral health care, but especially in the area of infection prevention when everyone is is so concerned about that now because of the pandemic and all the things that have that have happened. Um, I've seen several practices in past years that feature all of their dental assistants on their social media uh posts and highlighting how much time they've been with the practice and what their critical role is in the practice and just really giving them lots of kudos for all the things that they do and they contribute to the practice. So I think social media is a great tool. It's easy to do. Um, and I hope that we'll see a lot of that um this year with a lot of posting. And I'm so excited to see how much Dental Assistance Recognition Week has expanded. I served on the board of directors for the American Dental Assistance Association at the time when the American Dental Association came on board to endorse and expand this. And it's just grown exponentially over the years. So um I was kind of there at the infancy, and I'm glad to see um all the recognition that's happening.
SPEAKER_00And well deserved. And again, the sort of to cap off what you said, our patients don't oftentimes know exactly what it is that dental assistants do. They see dental assistants at the chair side, they see a greet, they dismiss, but then they don't really see the behind the scenes work that is done and realize really how hardworking dental assistants are. Olivia, how about you? Do you have anything to contribute to uh the conversation of how to celebrate dental assistance?
SPEAKER_01I agree with the comments of the other divas that we should make it special. You know, we've always had Administrative Professionals Day, which used to be known as Secretary's Day. And that was always nice to be featured in the dental office and get flowers or balloons or cupcakes. But the dental assistance week is an opportunity to showcase our hard-working dental assistants. And so really take the opportunity to feature them on your social media platforms and maybe even interview them for a minute or two, make a short video and ask a few questions, what they love about their profession. Because as Linda mentioned, we want to encourage people to go into this trade of dental assisting and recognizing it truly as a profession, a career, and not just a job, because they are such an important part of a dental practice. So let's prepare ahead of time so we can feature our hardworking dental assistants and show how much we appreciate what they do.
SPEAKER_00Olivia, that's great. Divas, thank you for all of the wonderful information that you provided. And I uh wish everyone a happy dental assistance recognition week. We are the compliance divas. We bring clarity and simplicity to compliance by navigating the regulatory environment to keep you on course. Again, please submit your questions to the support at compliancedivas.com, and our resources will be posted on the compliance divas website for this podcast on the CDC uh website, the training courses, the OSAP information, as well as how to get the dental infection prevention and control certification. And with that, we close another podcast.