The Future of Dentistry – Post COVID-19

The rise of COVID-19 certainly has had detrimental impacts, and it was something no one saw coming. This pandemic has resulted in businesses nationwide shutting down, millions of people losing their jobs, essential organizations migrating to online learning, and working, and worst of all, it has cost thousands of lives. When it comes to dentistry, dental offices everywhere are striving to find the ideal balance between helping others and reducing the spread of COVID-19. With this switch in mindset, social distancing in full effect, and the ramifications that have already taken place from this pandemic, it is no secret that the future of density will be significantly different than it is today. 

Updated Employee Policies on Health

Many small businesses and more substantial cooperations are already looking to redefine their policies to promote safer working environments. With this, dentistry is likely to be on the same train too. For instance, according to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), employers are now able to take employee temperatures, in a confidential setting, if they feel that they may be sick. Though this has been passed March 20th strictly due to COVID-19, it is likely it could stay and adopted as a regular dentistry health preventative measure.  

Other policy changes will take place due to OSHA regulation updates. OSHA has issued COVID-19 recommendations, which focuses on employers to prepare for infectious diseases, form response plans, and have protective actions in place against COVID-19 and any other conditions that may come. With this push for policy and procedure upgrades, once dentist offices develop them, chances are they will stay if found valuable and work well to prepare for any future cases. If successful, these new procedures could mean a culture employment shift and potential training to rise so everyone can get familiar both in the back and front end. For some more insight, some other things that may stick around after the social distancing lift include:

  • Reduction of stacking appointments
  • Changes in confirmation style, such as a health screening of patients before they come in (asking if they have any cold, flu, or other notable sickness symptoms recently).
  • Modifying the check-in process, meaning digitally or verbally, to avoid unnecessary counter or paperwork touching.
  • Mandatory annual or quarterly infection control training for all employees.
  • Re-organizing waiting room layouts to allow more space between chairs and cleaning the amenities more frequently (such as a coffee machine).
  • If not installed already, handsfree sinks, toilets, and paper towel dispensers.
  • Supplies will be sanitized upon delivery before opening.
  • Implementing the use of teledentistry and mobile dentistry for electronic data (imaging, treatments, consulting, diagnoses, etc.) to provide support digitally. 

Better Patient-Centered Care

For the most part, dentist offices are excellent at patient care and implement best practices. They conduct surveys, train to be interpersonal, and make patients feel calmed before performing services. Patient satisfaction is one of the top market points for branding. However, in the United States, dental practices often focus more on the economic realities, which strongly influences how dentists practice. Furthermore, since dentist offices are generally hectic and there are so many moving parts, at least before COVID-19, the attention for infection control measures may not have been paid attention to as well as it could have. Now with the heightened sense of its existence, it is going to be at the forefront of everyone’s minds, including patients. 

Post-COVID-19 could bring a different focal point and become more patient-centered (not just more surveys) but strive for their best interests and optimal results. This focal point means things such as consistency of their care and infection control. Patients going back into the office are going to be hypersensitive to their wellbeing and safety, so dental professionals must change their approaches to be more mindful of that reality and build that trust again. The best way to do this is by implementing high-quality infection control procedures and make it evidence-based. With this, it is envisioned that dentist offices will be wearing disposable gowns, face masks or shields, gloves, and any other OSHA PPE recommendations to prove to their patients that they are in the best hands.

Redefined Marketing Narratives

You have probably seen advertisements for dentists on billboards, commercials, magazines, etc. But how many of them promoted the safety of their patients over the services? It is suspected that promotional narratives will change, with less influence on services and more on patient care and safety as a top priority. Most people already know what a dentist will provide for them. What they want to know, especially after COVID-19, is will going to their building will be safe. 

So, in the future, advertisements that used to highlight whiter smiles, and “satisfaction guaranteed” signage, it will state more things such as top-notch infection control, and the use of technology for less physical contact. You may also notice that smiling doctor crossing his/her arms will change to someone wearing disposal gear and gloves to send the preventative measures message. 

Providing More Evidence-Based Procedures

Backing up a bit, before this pandemic, dentists often delivered the ideal solutions they gained from their professional careers and schooling. These experiences tend to work well, and most of the time, their professional skills are accurate and genuinely are the best approaches. However, patients post-COVID-19 are going to be gun-shy and want to have proof that what they are experiencing is legit and proven to be the ideal. With this new fear and demand for evidence in an uncertain environment, dentists may start using evidence-based dentistry (EBD) more often now. 

Since patients are going to be looking at dentist offices under a microscope coming out of quarantine, EBD can give them peace of mind because you can show them the hard facts and research to back your recommendations. New patient expectations mean that dentists and hygienists should be adapted to become more comfortable with justifying treatment recommendations because of the finding on clinical guidelines. Those that apply EBD to improve patient care will likely reference their research or studies often to prove their validity. These offices will have new training set in place for employees to understand how to read and deliver the literature, be held at a higher standard, and transform the culture to be more objective about evaluating approaches.

Conclusion 

Before COVID-19, it was pretty easy to call up your local dentist office and make your appointment, whether it was a routine cleaning, elective cosmetic procedure, or an emergency. Now, with the new ADHA COVID-19 policy, dental offices are strongly recommended to postpone all non-emergency or elective appointments out until further notice. Only people who have urgent care matters will be seen and only handled in settings that comply with precautionary federal guidelines. Though this is great for slowing the spread currently, there is no way that this industry will come out of this pandemic the same way it went in. 

These guidelines, of course, is certainly not a bad thing. Though COVID-19 is a disaster, it has opened the doors to see where dentists can improve, and the changes made to achieve optimal safety during dental procedures. COVID-19 could lead to brand new approaches altogether and be a catalyst for even more technological or infection control tactics much later down the road. Again, it is still unknown. But though the above is all speculation, there is strong evidence that it could take place and be the new reality of dentistry, and everyone, both patients and professionals, should be prepared for these future improvement changes to occur. 

For further information on our upcoming Infection Control – 2020 Vision online E-course call us today at 385-799-4101 for details!

 

 

Teaching Through a Pandemic: A Mindset for This Moment

COVID-19, ONLINE LEARNING

Hundreds of teachers, many of them operating in countries where teach-from-home has been in place for weeks, weigh in on the mental approach you need to stay grounded in this challenging time.

The thought ended almost before it started: “This is so overwhelming.” It was all one teacher managed to type before she stopped short, vexed into silence, perhaps, by the sheer size of the problem. In the pregnant pause that followed, undoubtedly, every teacher tracking the unspooling thread—about the dizzying, rapidly escalating viral crisis that was closing schools across the country—recognized the chasm they were all facing as well, and scrambled to fill in the blank.

In the next few hours, over 500 teachers joined two Facebook conversations about teaching during the coronavirus pandemic, spilling out their concerns and anxieties: What will we do if the schools close for months? How can I shift to online learning if we’re closing tomorrow, or even in a few hours? How will special education students be cared for, and IEPs administered? What about children who have no internet access, or who will be required, as Keith Schoch thoughtfully noted, to “become de facto babysitters” for their brothers and sisters. “There is no digital divide, but there is a digital abyss, and America’s rural poor are living at the bottom of it,” said Anne Larsen, with devastating concision. What if, in the end, the school systems decide that online learning is working just fine, and never reopen?

The panic was perfectly understandable.

But there were plenty of teachers in the mix who had weeks of crisis experience under their belts by that time—several in Hong Kong and Italy and the state of Washington, for example—and others who had long careers in online and distance learning. In the end, too, there were many fantastic, highly creative teachers providing strategies as fast as the obstacles appeared.

At the highest level, a shift in mindset is required—even the most optimistic educators conceded the point. There are plenty of strategies and tactics we’re covering at Edutopia—and we’ll continue to—but here are the crucial emotional and psychological scaffolds that our audience agreed would be needed to teach in this new paradigm.

EXPECT TRIAL… AND PLENTY OF ERROR

Start by being reasonable with yourself. It is, in fact, impossible to shift to distance learning overnight without lots of trial and error. Expect it, plan for it, and do your best to make peace with it.

“I can tell you, now that we’re in week 7 of online learning, that much of what you will do will be trial and error,” wrote Stacy Rausch Keevan, who was teaching in Hong Kong. “Don’t stress about that—it won’t do you any good. For my middle school English and humanities classes, I’m offering the same lessons I would normally do live, but in smaller doses.”

ACKNOWLEDGE THE EXTRAORDINARY

Reset your baseline. We’re all operating in the shadow of a global pandemic, and it is disorienting and limiting. Business, as usual, is unrealistic.

The real “points to consider” are not “the strict adherence to ‘regular’ conditions and norms,” wrote Amy Rheault-Heafield in a reply to a question about how to structure distance learning like more typical learning experiences, “but how to provide a rich experience to all learners who are now without ‘traditional’ teachers standing beside them in classes.”

So while you should try to provide “meaningful activities,” cautioned elementary teacher John Thomas, “we should remember that on short notice—and because many of us have limited PD utilizing these tools—we can’t tackle everything immediately. In other words, we should give ourselves the time and permission to figure this out.”

REDUCE THE WORKLOAD (FOR YOURSELF AND YOUR STUDENTS)

If your district allows it, you should plan to do less. Students won’t be able to work as productively, anyway—so if you can’t scale back, you’ll be sending them to work they cannot do—and your own life and family need added care.

“Feedback from students and families over the last ten days in Italy is ‘less is more,'” commented Jo Gillespie. “Consider that parents are trying to work from home, and siblings are vying for computer and Wi-Fi time. Try Google quizzes using Forms, a reading log, some short live sessions with teachers and classmates, maybe vocabulary extension, maths, and geometry problems (but not too many). And that’s probably enough.”

And Keevan, the teacher in Hong Kong with weeks of experience, confirmed that time and distance play funny games during a crisis: “What would normally take you one class period to teach in the classroom will probably take you twice as long.”

NO PERSON IS AN ISLAND

Humans are social animals. Working from home, or worse, from quarantine, is isolating and often depressing for both teachers and students.

Make a concerted effort to speak to other colleagues and trusted professionals to provide emotional and psychological context to your work. Teaching at this moment is extraordinarily hard, and you’ll need the virtual company of people who are experiencing what you are.

And don’t forget to “reach out to students as often as you can,” said Keevan, who still teaches classes live despite a (slightly inconvenient!) 13-hour time difference. Or you can facilitate peer-to-peer communication. John Thomas assigns pen pals in his first- and second-grade classes so that kids with no internet can feel like they belong.

EVERYONE THINKS THEY CAN’T—BEFORE THEY CAN

Some degree of pessimism and self-doubt comes with the territory. Teachers in the Facebook thread advised more perspective-taking and being more patient with yourself: You know how to teach, and you will figure this out in time.

“We are in week seven, and I have three children of my own at home,” wrote Salecia Host, a teacher in Tianjin, China, reflecting on the arc of her emotional response to the crisis. “Just take it day by day. It gets less overwhelming and more routine.”

Try to remain calm—though you’ll have a few moments where that goes out the window—and keep plugging away: “Being open-minded and flexible is key,” said Kaz Wilson, who also works in China. “Everyone thinks you can’t until you pause, talk it out with folks who are doing it and know that you’ll get through it.”

MIND THE GAP

Your work will be hard, but students are facing more severe challenges. Students with no internet or no computer will need support, as will those with learning differences or other circumstances that make distance learning especially tricky. Supporting these students was on almost everyone’s mind—it came up dozens of times in the Facebook thread.

“I’m in Italy. Our schools closed a few weeks ago without any previous warning. We shifted to online immediately. It is hard and exhausting,” admitted Eleonora Borromeo, before providing a ray of hope. “Equity is an issue. Assessment is an issue. But the students are doing their best and giving us the strength to go on.”

Solutions from our audience of teachers focused on the old analog approaches: paper-and-pencil tasks, workbooks, and activity packets that can be mailed home, and updating parents and students via phone calls daily.

Interested in learning more on our online courses? Call us today at 385-799-4101 for details!

ReShaping Education in 2020

Three ways the COVID-19 pandemic could reshape education.

  • The coronavirus pandemic has changed how millions around the globe are educated.
  • New solutions for education could bring much-needed innovation.
  • Given the digital divide, new shifts in education approaches could widen equality gaps.

In a matter of weeks, coronavirus (COVID-19) has changed how students are educated around the world. Those changes give us a glimpse at how education could change for the better – and the worse – in the long term.

With the coronavirus spreading rapidly across Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and the United States, countries have taken swift and decisive actions to mitigate the development of a full-blown pandemic. In the past two weeks, there have been multiple announcements suspending attendance at schools and universities. As of March 13, the OECD estimated that over 421 million children are affected due to school closures announced or implemented in 39 countries. Also, another 22 states have announced partial “localized” closures.

These risk-control decisions have led millions of students into temporary ‘home-schooling’ situations, especially in some of the most heavily impacted countries, like China, South Korea, Italy, and Iran. These changes have certainly caused a degree of inconvenience, but they have also prompted new examples of educational innovation. Although it is too early to judge how reactions to COVID-19 will affect education systems around the world, signs are suggesting that it could have a lasting impact on the trajectory of learning innovation and digitization. 

Below, we follow three trends that could hint at future transformations:

1. Education – nudged and pushed to change – could lead to surprising innovations

The slow pace of change in academic institutions globally is lamentable, with centuries-old, lecture-based approaches to teaching, entrenched institutional biases, and old classrooms. However, COVID-19 has become a catalyst for educational institutions worldwide to search for innovative solutions in a relatively short period.

To help slow the virus’ spread, students in Hong Kong started to learning at home, in February, via interactive apps. In China, 120 million Chinese got access to learning material through live television broadcasts.

Other more straightforward – yet no less creative – solutions have been implemented around the globe. In one Nigerian school, standard asynchronous online learning tools (such as reading material via Google Classroom), were augmented with synchronous face-to-face video instruction, to help preempt school closures.

Similarly, students at one school in Lebanon began leveraging online learning, even for subjects such as physical education. Students shot and sent over their videos of athletic training and sports to their teachers as “homework,” pushing students to learn new digital skills. One student’s parent remarked, “while the sports exercise took a few minutes, my son spent three hours shooting, editing, and sending the video in the right format to his teacher.”

With 5G technology becoming more prevalent in countries such as China, U.S., and Japan, we will see learners and solution providers genuinely embracing the ‘learning anywhere, anytime’ concept of digital education in a range of formats. Traditional in-person classroom learning will be complemented with new learning modalities – from live broadcasts to ‘educational influencers’ to virtual reality experiences. Education could become a habit that integrates into daily routines – an authentic lifestyle.

2. Public-private educational partnerships could grow in importance

In just the past few weeks, we have seen learning consortiums and coalitions taking shape, with diverse stakeholders – including governments, publishers, education professionals, technology providers, and telecom network operators – coming together to utilize digital platforms as a temporary solution to the crisis. In emerging countries where the government has predominantly provided education, this could become a prevalent and consequential trend to future learning.

In China, the Ministry of Education has assembled a group of diverse constituents to develop a new cloud-based, online learning and broadcasting platform as well as to upgrade a suite of education infrastructure, led by the Education Ministry and Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

Similarly, the Hong Kong-based readtogether.hk forum (China Daily video here) is a consortium of over 60 educational organizations, publishers, media, and entertainment industry professionals, providing more than 900 educational assets, including videos, book chapters, assessment tools, and counseling services for free. The consortium intends to continue using and maintaining the platform even after COVID-19 is contained.

Through examples like these, it is evident that educational innovation is receiving attention beyond the typical government-funded or non-profit-backed social project. In the past decade, we have already seen far greater interest and investment coming from the private sector in education solutions and innovation. From Microsoft and Google in the U.S. to Samsung in Korea to Tencent, Ping An, and Alibaba in China, corporations are awakening to the strategic imperative of an educated populace. While most initiatives to date have been limited in scope, and relatively isolated, the pandemic could pave the way for much larger-scale, cross-industry coalitions formed around a common educational goal.

3. The digital divide could widen

Most schools in affected areas are finding stop-gap solutions to continue teaching, but the quality of learning is heavily dependent on the level and quality of digital access. After all, only around 60% of the globe’s population is online. While virtual classes on personal tablets may be the norm in Hong Kong, for example, many students in less developed economies rely on lessons and assignments sent via WhatsApp or email.

Moreover, the less affluent and digitally savvy individual families are, the further their students are left behind. When classes transition online, these children lose out because of the cost of digital devices and data plans.

Unless access costs decrease and quality of access increase in all countries, the gap in education quality, and thus socioeconomic equality, will be further exacerbated. The digital divide could become more extreme if educational accessibility is dictated by access to the latest technologies.

The rapid spread of COVID-19 has demonstrated the importance of building resilience to face various threats, from pandemic disease to extremist violence to climate insecurity, and even, yes, rapid technological change. The pandemic is also an opportunity to remind ourselves of the skills students need in this unpredictable world, such as informed decision making, creative problem solving, and perhaps above all, adaptability. Resilience must be built into our educational system to ensure those skills remain a priority for all students.

For additional information on our E-Learning platform and Online Courses, call us today at 385-799-4101. 

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