Tips for Reopening Orthodontic Office After COVID-19

We are officially back to work as of yesterday!

Our patients' and the team's safety remains our top priority.

Here's Dr. Jonathan "Dr. Jono" Gluck with a few pointers for our orthodontic colleagues who will be reopening their practices soon. Feel free to reach out with any questions!

Yesterday, Wednesday, May 6th was our first day back seeing patients. So, a couple of pointers for everyone that we'll be starting soon.

Number one, highly recommended is the past two days before we got back to seeing patients as we brought our whole team into the office and did a two-day dress rehearsal. We went over all of our new policies and procedures, we clean the office. The best thing though was we got to talk through any potential issues. And really just spend some time together as a team kind of reacquaint ourselves with each other.

We're running it about half of our normal capacity this week, probably next week just to see how things go, which gives us some extra hands in the clinic assistants who aren't seeing patients clean up, sterilize, help with charting because the appointment flow is a little bit slower than normal.

We have taken one of our team members and positioned her at the front door. So, when patients come in, to be screened, she's there to greet them and also this will kind of limit people from walking in for an appointment, which we've decided not to do walk-ins for the time being.

Another big one is we are using more PPE, gowns, gloves, masks, face shields, N95 masks for the doctors, and barriers. My dad and I really feel like the doctor needs to set the tone in terms of keeping up with this. I think it's very simple and very easy if you're not careful to kind of backslide into your normal routine. So, for example, in our clinic, you know, we're spacing patients out every other chair. But when we get busy, like yesterday afternoon, it was really easy to say, okay, maybe we'll just put two right next to each other so that we don't run behind. So, I think it's really up to the doctors to set the tone and say, No, let's, let's take a few extra minutes, turn the chairs over, and then make sure that we're doing this properly.

Normally, we take a 60-minute lunch, we decided to extend that to 90 minutes, and then we have two teams where half the team will take an early lunch, and the others will clean up from the morning, and then the other half will take a later lunch and then the others come back and get set up for the afternoon. Again, just a little bit of extra buffer time, so that we can clean up and set up and be ready to go.

And then the last thing is we do a morning huddle every day. But we've decided for at least this week, and maybe next week just to do an after-work huddle, get together as a team, and really give everyone an opportunity to ask questions, give us comments, talk about things that are working or what's not working, and really just to get everything off their chest. So, that way that when we leave the office, we can go home to our families, and really just enjoy that time, as opposed to a kind of carrying things with them.

So, hope this was helpful. If you guys have any questions, please call our office. We first and foremost appreciate everyone, all the resources that are being put out there, all of the orthodontists that we've talked to, and vendors. So thank you so much. We wish you all the best. Good luck. Thanks!

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Видео Tips for Reopening Orthodontic Office After COVID-19 канала Gluck Orthodontics