The Association for Dental Safety launched an organization dedicated to providing clinical guidelines and best practices after the CDC’s oral health division was eliminated in a round of federal layoffs earlier this year.
The ADS previously oversaw dental infection prevention and patient safety initiatives in partnership with the CDC. Now, the new ADS Institute for Dental Safety and Science will work to continue developing guidelines and best practices.
One of the first tasks the new group will undertake is appointing an advisory committee that will oversee updates to the CDC’s infection control guidelines for dental healthcare settings. The CDC last updated these guidelines in 2003.
Executive Director Michelle Lee and Chair Eve Cuny recently spoke with Becker’s to discuss the organization’s goals for continuing the CDC’s oral health work.
Editor’s note: These responses were lightly edited for clarity and length.
Question: How important is it for dental practices to have these guidelines and best practices available to them from a national organization versus just from the state level?
Eve Cuny: I think it’s critically important because even at the state level, those regulators — the dental boards and the public health departments that oversee the licensure of dentists and other dental health professionals — often look to the national guidelines to be able to develop their own regulations and guidelines for dentists in their states. There really does need to be a sort of central clearinghouse for consensus, guidelines, best practices and those types of things, so that those other agencies have somewhere to look. They don’t always have the bandwidth and the internal expertise needed to be able to develop that without some national guidance.
Q: What can you share about the group’s first task of updating the CDC’s infection control guidelines for dental settings?
EC: There was already a working group working with the CDC to develop guidance in one specific area, [which was] to update the guidance on dental unit water lines because in recent years, the outbreaks of Nontuberculous mycobacteria in children and dental practices have raised a lot of concern about current practices. A number of us were on that working group with the CDC, and that work was nearing completion. We know that needs some attention, and then the rest of the 2003 guidelines should be reviewed and determined which areas do require some updating, because certainly not all of them do. Some of the science has changed, but some of it has stayed the same.
Q: Were there other oral health projects being worked on before the layoffs that are now unfinished?
Michelle Lee: We had hosted listening sessions for the CDC over the past two years to get feedback on where challenges were in the current guidelines. So they were taking that information and they were getting prepared to start a full review. So we were hopeful that it was going to start this year. That was one piece. This is not something we’re taking on, but they were responsible for funding the dental public health departments of 15 states, and we were a partner in that work and supporting them with technical assistance when it comes to infection prevention guidelines, so all of that’s in question going forward.
Q: What are some other goals for the organization going forward?
EC: We certainly want to identify who our core advisory committee will be first, and we plan to have a strategic session to come up with our priorities, but [our focuses] beyond the guidelines update would be tools and education materials for the profession and maybe things such as whitepapers and position papers that would just help push out information. Our whole goal is to help providers ensure safe dental visits, and that’s whether it’s infection prevention or other areas of safety that we’ve addressed as an organization in the past. We’re really focused on safety itself, both for patients but also for providers.
