Best Practices

The purpose of Health Technical Memorandum 01-05 is to progressively raise the quality of decontamination in dental surgeries and facilities using methods highlighted in HTM 01-05, obviously leading to less risk of disease and contamination throughout the work environment. This Progress towards achieving best practice could be seen as almost a never-ending process of development with the discovery of new and often more adequate sterilization techniques.

Some of the key issues or areas concerned with the misuse of purified water and neglect of a could-be contaminated work place and instruments include the following:

• Improve separation of decontamination processes from other activities and enhance the distinction between clean and dirty workflows around the workplace.
• Provide and develop suitable storage for instruments that have been sterilized with purified water, which inevitably reduces exposure to air and a possible risk of pathogenic contamination. The system should be focused on safe and orderly storage of instruments. This will ensure that instrument storage is well protected in the appropriate clean room against the possibility of exposure of stored instruments to contaminated aerosols.
• Install a modern validated washer-disinfector of adequate capacity to remove the need for manual washing with purified water. If this isn’t possible, workers should take every measure to ensure that decontamination tasks are done separately, or using another form of sterilization to avoid the risk of contamination.
• Dental hand pieces should be cleaned and sterilized with purified water and other sterilization products after each patient has been examined or treated.