text: Have you been to the dentist during lockdown? I understand if you are a little hesitant. But your dental health is very important, so here’s what we are doing at Nova Dental on Collins St, to help during restrictions.
  24 hours before your appointment we will run through a series of triage questions designed by Maven dental to confirm you aren’t experiencing any flu like symptoms or had any known contact with a Covid19 case.
  On arrival you should be wearing a mask, which we will ask you to leave on and to use our alcohol based hand rub. We will run through our triage questions again, whilst taking your temperature, which should be between 36-37C. We will then record this information for contact tracing.
  When you enter the surgery your dentist may ask you these questions again and expand on them a little, to explain why your answers are important. Then you will do a one minute peroxide mouth wash before we start treatment.
  During the appointment we will endeavour to keep the aerosols to an absolute minimum using high volume suction and rubber dam.
  What is the dentist and staff doing at Nova dental that you may not be aware of?
  We are also answering the same questions for ourselves and every staff member every day, about flu like symptoms and contact.
  We are practicing social distancing and following all of the lockdown laws currently imposed in Melbourne and we all have the Covidsafe app on our phones.
  Our temperature is taken as soon as we arrive at work and we use the hand sanitiser all day long in every area of the clinic, whilst wearing a mask throughout the surgery even when not treating patients.
  We are wearing scrubs, disposal gowns, gloves, masks, protective eyewear and in some cases full face shields. Of course we continue to practice the highest standard of sterilisation plus we’ve increased our breaks between patients to 10mins to give our sterilisation products further time to be effective against Covid19.
  We are offering telehealth to our patients who are not able to come in person to the clinic. Even though you don’t physically visit us, there may still be questions you’d like answered or tips on how to maintain good dental health and maintenance during this time.
  It looks like Covid19 is going to be part of our community for a little longer. It is important that you continue to look after your overall health and that includes your dental needs. So if you’re feeling comfortable I would recommend you give us a call at Maven dental for a visit or just a chat.