Traceability and treatment safety in the dental practice

Today a modern dental practice is required to guarantee safety standards during treatments and healthcare, putting into place all necessary steps to reduce possible risks involved.

In the first place, this means stepping up prevention and risk-management activities by making appropriate usage of structural, instrumental, technological and organisational resources.

From this point of view, the entire sterilisation process (and all activities aimed at boosting its efficiency) take on a vital role because they are the first barrier against cross infections. This is because whenever instruments are not dealt with properly, they can become the means whereby infectious diseases are spread from one patient to another.

Adopting an optimised modern sterilisation protocol which deals with all procedures in an orderly dependable fashion enables the dental practice to deliver a punctual, safe, controlled and constantly verifiable service.

Developed to restore sterility to instruments and ensure patient and operator safety, sterilisation today is also required to provide evidence that all stages have been properly executed. The process must be kept track of and previous records about the instruments and how they were used must be stored in the database.

A safety guarantee, thus, for patients undergoing operations with instruments that have been scrupulously sterilised and are identified and identifiable (with a system of labels and codes); but there is another form of guarantee – an operational and legal guarantee for the dental practice with information and data that is able to demonstrate, prove and reconstruct at any given time (and, in the event of disputes) that the dental practice followed its own internal procedures properly.

In the dentistry field, all instruments used for each single patient must undergo a specific procedure aimed at restoring sterility so they are ready to be used again.

The sterilisation process envisages a series of successive steps, going from picking the instruments up after usage, to initial decontamination, subsequent disinfection, washing, drying, pouching and autoclave sterilisation.

Various interconnected phases and processes aimed at achieving a single goal: delivering outstanding safety. Each one of the steps involved must not only be scrupulously carried out, it must also be monitored, validated and traced so as to make sure that the process is reliable and safe.

This means that each sterilisation cycle needs to be monitored and recorded. There must be a protocol whereby each batch of materials or pouch of instruments due to be used on patients has its own label so that all the information is neatly organised and all the phases of the process and their outcome can be retrieved. This means you know what instrument was used on which patient and when.

A physical and digital record is created for each patient containing all the information on the sterilisation process and the data is updated for each appointment and treatment.

Using technology and methods aimed at data traceability for materials used and data retrievability for sterilised instruments meets requirements laid down by Italian legislation on sterilisation procedures and is in keeping with the indications given by major international guidelines.

Validation, traceability and retrievability are a prime requisite for a well run dental practice because these factors contribute to a tight organisation and smooth daily operations but also because they prove and bear witness to the fact that work was carried out properly.

In addition to managing the protocol in an orderly and efficient manner, the advanced traceability system enables the practice to protect itself in the event of disputes as it preserves evidence that work was carried out properly.

So, traceability allows us to check the information that certifies instrument sterility prior to use on the patient – information about the sterilisation date, type of cycle, serial number, cycle outcome, operator in charge of the cycle and expiration date as established by the internal sterilisation protocol.

Furthermore, this procedure (particularly when it is digitalised) allows us to rapidly reconstruct past activities that took place on a sterilised device, so that the user and relevant bodies are able to retrieve the information required.

With Pro System, Euronda has rethought and organised all the sterilisation phases, bringing them together under a sole connected and integrated protection protocol.

A system of communicating machinery which records, checks and shares data on the working cycles for each single stage and allows you to be constantly up-to-date for the process on each single instrument.

A system which innovates the concepts of validation, traceability and retrievability, by digitalising and automating procedures and giving you guaranteed data control and outstandingly smooth operations.

Not only does the Pro-System traceability system meet legislative requirements on sterilisation, but it takes the concept of prevention to new heights, boosting safety standards for dental healthcare provision.